Modern society is unimaginable without clock time. With the rise of the chronometer came a vast increase in discipline, efficiency and social speed, transforming every institution and human endeavor. The factory, the office, transportation, business, the flow of information, indeed almost everything we do and relate to is to a greater or lesser extent controlled by the clock.

It was not always like this. In a medieval village, the day started not with the beep of the  alarm clock but with birds gradually beginning to twitter, the light slowly starting to shine through the windows. When the observation of natural cycles played a greater role in people’s awareness of temporality, change was “softer,” less precisely calculable, and intimately tied to a more fluid and large-scale sense of rhythm. In all likelihood, the inhabitant of a medieval village could also contrast sublunar time with some vision of eternity or “higher time” in which the soul was allowed to participate in a higher order of being.

The above passage comes from Espen Hammer’s article in the NYT Philosophy section, The Stone. He’s reflecting on how the modern advancement of being able to mechanically and meticulously calculate time forever transformed and reshaped our lives on this planet.

Doesn’t life in the medieval village sounds nice? Waking up not by an alarm clock but by the sun gently shining on your face. (It sounds a lot like my weekends actually) Hammer goes on to elaborate on how the ordered, sequential nature of time exacerbates and intensifies our sense of transience and how we “long for that looser structure of the medieval village (while retaining our modern comforts and medical advances, of course).”

Thankfully, Shaupenhaurer comes to the rescue:

Responding to this sense of transience, Schopenhauer rather desperately throws in a salvific conception of beauty as being capable of suspending our normal temporal awareness. Aesthetic experience, he claims, pulls us beyond our normal subjection to temporal sequentiality. The sunset or the Beethoven string quartet can be so ravishing that we find ourselves lost in the unchanging essentiality they present to us.

This chronologically liberating phenomenon that Schopenhauer is eluding to sounds a lot like what the Greeks call Aion, which Jesus is found frequently referring to throughout the New Testament. In any event, in 2012 (and beyond) may we all live the life we were meant to live, and experience the salvific, beautiful life available to us at this very moment.

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Collage above by Jenny Brown

Tags:AionEspen HammerJesusNew YearsphilosophySchopenhauertime