As my time at Oxford begins to wind down, I have been thinking more and more about time itself. Of course, it's not hard to be time-conscious at Oxford; the past makes itself inescapable here.
What I have come to really love about Oxford are the countless portraits of kings, clergymen, and scholars hanging in the college dining halls and libraries. Courting immortality, they stare on with wry smiles as we strive to make our own mark on the future. In a sense, past and future get constantly wrapped up in each moment, propelling the entire enterprise of learning forward. I have come to think that all this creates a kind of subtle religious experience, one that was perhaps more available to our forbearers.
In his book A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor argues that we today have a fundamentally different experience of time than did our medieval selves. Taylor indicates that the pre-modern world had various conceptions of a higher time, which punctuated the profane ordinary times of our daily lives. Higher times, such as the defining events in salvation history (for instance, the crucifixion [of Jesus]), introduce warps and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering. Beginning with Augustine, Latin Christendom thus came to see eternity as a kind of gathered time which brought together past, present, and future. As a result, Christians in the Middle Ages could say they brushed with eternity in, for instance, the celebration of the Eucharist.
According to Taylor, a key distinguishing feature of modern life is that its inhabitants no longer live with this kind of complex time-consciousness. Of course, people still believe in eternity, but the experience of higher time has receded further and further away from our brute experience of the world. We all swim in the current of ordinary secular time, speeding through a succession of moments that Max Weber famously called "the iron cage."
Sometimes, however, I have the feeling that traces of higher time remain at Oxford. There are moments when one can almost feel time reverberate in the Cotswold limestone quads. I think that's also in part because the academic year is divided into something like high and low time: three eight-week terms (all named after feast days) divided by two six-week breaks. Each term explodes like a bundle of Augustinian time, with the end coming almost on the tail of the beginning. And for the regular degree candidates, the future is all the more present, for the ebb-and-flow culminates at the end of one's third and final year with examinations that determine the marks with which one graduates.
The contrast with American universities is stark: back home, we live in a deeply embedded ordinary time, with grade point averages inching up or down incrementally as our tenure progresses. As Taylor points out, life in ordinary, secular time has led us to measure and organize time as never before in human history. Time has become a precious resource, not to be wasted. And indeed, even when sauntering around the university gardens or the Oxford bookshops, one somehow never feels that same urgent, pressurized feeling that something remains ever to be done. The workload is largely the same, but time somehow flows more freely. Or maybe it's because of the portraits, winking at us in encouragement. We got away with it, they seem to be saying, and you will too.
In his book A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor argues that we today have a fundamentally different experience of time than did our medieval selves. Taylor indicates that the pre-modern world had various conceptions of a higher time, which punctuated the profane ordinary times of our daily lives. Higher times, such as the defining events in salvation history (for instance, the crucifixion [of Jesus]), introduce warps and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering. Beginning with Augustine, Latin Christendom thus came to see eternity as a kind of gathered time which brought together past, present, and future. As a result, Christians in the Middle Ages could say they brushed with eternity in, for instance, the celebration of the Eucharist.
According to Taylor, a key distinguishing feature of modern life is that its inhabitants no longer live with this kind of complex time-consciousness. Of course, people still believe in eternity, but the experience of higher time has receded further and further away from our brute experience of the world. We all swim in the current of ordinary secular time, speeding through a succession of moments that Max Weber famously called "the iron cage."
Sometimes, however, I have the feeling that traces of higher time remain at Oxford. There are moments when one can almost feel time reverberate in the Cotswold limestone quads. I think that's also in part because the academic year is divided into something like high and low time: three eight-week terms (all named after feast days) divided by two six-week breaks. Each term explodes like a bundle of Augustinian time, with the end coming almost on the tail of the beginning. And for the regular degree candidates, the future is all the more present, for the ebb-and-flow culminates at the end of one's third and final year with examinations that determine the marks with which one graduates.
The contrast with American universities is stark: back home, we live in a deeply embedded ordinary time, with grade point averages inching up or down incrementally as our tenure progresses. As Taylor points out, life in ordinary, secular time has led us to measure and organize time as never before in human history. Time has become a precious resource, not to be wasted. And indeed, even when sauntering around the university gardens or the Oxford bookshops, one somehow never feels that same urgent, pressurized feeling that something remains ever to be done. The workload is largely the same, but time somehow flows more freely. Or maybe it's because of the portraits, winking at us in encouragement. We got away with it, they seem to be saying, and you will too.
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