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Chapter 8 - Timelessness and the Now

from Part I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2022

Simon Goldhill
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The messianic religions that came to dominate this lived life of late antiquity made waiting central to their sense of temporality, as we have seen. As the poets of erotics have always known, there is certain headiness in the combination of fervour and deferral. Waiting, however, structures the sense of the present – the now – with a question of its value, its temporariness. ‘Who would deny that the present has no duration?’, asked Augustine. In the nineteenth century, William James tried to answer this anxiety about the duration and thus evaluation of the ‘nowness’ of the now with an empirical, experimentally tested answer: ‘the practically cognized present is no knife-edge’, he concluded, ‘but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched and from which we look in two directions into time’. It was possible to count in seconds, and then in fractions of seconds, a human experience of now, a breadth measured ‘from one five-hundreth of a second to twelve seconds’.

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The Christian Invention of Time
Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity
, pp. 156 - 180
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Timelessness and the Now
  • Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Christian Invention of Time
  • Online publication: 13 January 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009071260.009
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  • Timelessness and the Now
  • Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Christian Invention of Time
  • Online publication: 13 January 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009071260.009
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Timelessness and the Now
  • Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Christian Invention of Time
  • Online publication: 13 January 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009071260.009
Available formats
×