Time

Volume VII, Number 4 | fall 2014

Preamble

Captain Clock

By Lewis H. Lapham

From overtime to downtime, spending time to saving time, the uses and abuses of our minutes and days.

NASA image of the colorful starburst galaxy M82.

Essay

The Grand Illusion

By Jim Holt

Does time have a future? Yes, but how much of a future depends on what the ultimate fate of the cosmos turns out to be.

An infographic showing a map of deep space and deep time.

Map

Marking Time

A journey into deep space and deep time.

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Miscellany

To combat widespread tardiness in the Ivory Coast, President Laurent Gbagbo in 2007 backed a Punctuality Night contest, which touted the slogan “African time is killing Africa, let’s fight it.” Nine prizes were awarded to the most punctual civil servants and businesspeople. Known to his colleagues as “Mr. White Man’s Time,” legal adviser Narcisse Aka won the first-place prize, a $60,000 villa.

Voices In Time

1919 | Pangbourne

The Incarnate Now Is Supreme

Poetry is the voice of the far future or of the magnificent past.More

Voices In Time

2012 | United States

Punching In

Mac McClelland is on the clock and on her feet.More

Voices In Time

1906 | Dunsany

Declaration of War

Time hurled five years against them, and the years passed over their heads.More

Charts & Graphs

Chart showing the daily schedules of different artists.

Day Planners

When Mozart slept and when the Queen takes her tea.

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Mac McClelland sanding in muddy field in Africa.

Photograph of Marguerite Yourcenar with a headscarf sitting in a chair outside.

Contributors

Image from an illuminated manuscript of Boethius teaching two students.

Bill Russell leaps for a basketball while playing for the Celtics.

Black and white image of Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca the Younger.

Years are nothing to me—they should be nothing to you. Who asked you to count them or to consider them? In the world of wild nature, time is measured by seasons only—the bird does not know how old it is—the rose tree does not count its birthdays!

- Marie Corelli, 1911