Monthly Blog Archives - Penelope J Corfield

MONTHLY BLOG 172, CAN YOU NAME FIVE STRIKING POEMS ABOUT TIME??

3 April 2025/in Monthly Blog, Time/by Penelope J. Corfield

172.1 Time’s Wingèd Chariot
© Phrase-finder 2025

In contrast to the dearth of good jokes about Time, there are very many great poems on that theme.¹ Here, however, I’ve chosen just five.

Firstly, Andrew Marvell’s appeal to ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (published posthumously in 1681)² is a magnificent example of the human awareness of life in ever-fleeting Time. The poet is keenly impatient to get his lover into bed with him; but she does not share his haste. So he reproaches her, gently enough but pointedly:

‘Had we but world enough and Time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime ….’

He explains that ideally he would take much longer to woo her – and to dwell in turn on all the beauties of her body and her heart. Yet he is vividly aware of the passing of Time. Or as he puts it, magnificently:

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity. …’

Whether trying to win a race against the clock is the best appeal to get a coy lover into bed remains uncertain. The outcome, however, makes for a great poem, which has been multiply quoted and referenced. So Marvell did win a resonant through-Time fame, even though history does not record whether this poem actually melted the heart of his coy lover.

Another mighty poet of Time is William Shakespeare.³ His sonnets refer to temporality in tones ranging from acceptance to pulsating anger. In Sonnet 16, he urges the dedicatee to ‘Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time’. Elsewhere, too, he refers to the dark power of ‘Devouring Time’ (Sonnet 19) or the harsh blows inflicted by ‘Time’s injurious hand’ (Sonnet 63) or by Time’s ‘scythe and crooked knife’ (Sonnet 100). Yet at other moments, Shakespeare stresses instead the speedy passage of ‘swift-footed Time’ (also Sonnet 19) and the unpredictability of ‘Time’s fickle glass’ (Sonnet 126). All variants being undeniably evocative.

Yet my favourite is Sonnet 116. It’s rightly famous and much quoted, because it applauds the power of Love to outlast even mighty Time. It starts briskly: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments’. And continues with a strong affirmation: ‘Love is not love/ Which alters when it Alteration finds’. No! Real human affection will triumph against all odds:

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come.

Love alters not within his brief hours and weeks

But bears it out, even to the edge of doom’.

And, musing on tensions between the swift passing of Time and the eternity of Time, here’s my third choice. It’s the Ode to a Nightingale (1819) by John Keats.⁴ The poet is sadly downcast by ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’ of daily living. He sits outside on a dark summer night, thinking of death whilst listening to the song of the nightingale:

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Nonetheless, the poet’s thoughts turn also to the eternal powers of nature and of beauty. Some things can last through Time:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown …

Thinking seriously about Time can thus induce thoughts of death – and antidotes to death. The fourth work cited here is not a charming poem – and not intended as such. It’s entitled Howl (1956) and that’s what it does. Alan Ginsberg⁵ starts bleakly: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/’ … and he continues in that vein as he recalls their collective lives in Time. The poem’s long, long sentences, set as blank verse, reek of self-loathing allied to despair about his entre peer group, known as the ‘Beat Generation’.

Only occasionally does a wry humour shine through. Consider Ginsberg’s verdict on his friends’ disdain for the passing of Time. They ‘threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade’.

But Ginsberg was sure that he and his peer group were seeking something greater than a chaotic lifestyle. Hence they ‘dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between two visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together …’. Ginsberg’s personal solution was to embrace Buddhism, though not all did so.

Time’s travails can obviously lead to multiple outcomes. But it’s impossible not to be involved with Time. My fifth and last choice – ‘quick now, here, now always!’ – is The Four Quartets (1943), an amalgamation of four poems by the twentieth-century’s great mystic poet of temporality, T.S. Eliot.⁶ His message is often enigmatic. He loves a paradox. So one opaque comment declares the outcome to be: ‘Never and always!’ (Verse 3 Little Giddings).

Above all, therefore, Time is not divided into separate segments, Eliot argues. The past and the present are not locked away in separate compartments. They live in humanity’s through-Time consciousness. Hence he muses that:

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Consciousness reaches beyond the immediate moment. Yet, simultaneously, consciousness only operates in the here-and-now. So here is another paradox: ‘Only through Time, Time is conquered’. And living within the inexorable power of Time is painful, not restful. After all, ‘… this thing is sure/ That Time is no healer’ ….

Eliot thus expresses a dogged acceptance of the painful limitations of human existence. It’s a tough message. But people must trudge onwards. Not everyone would put the stoic message in these terms. Yet there’s no doubt that Eliot’s philosophy makes for highly evocative poetry:

Time present and Time past

Are both perhaps present in Time future,

And Time future contained in Time past.

If all Time is eternally present All Time is unredeemable.

ENDNOTES:

¹ See PJC BLOG/ 171 (March 2025) for the lack of great jokes about Time. And for wider context, see PJC, Time-Space: We Are All in It Together (London, 205).

² Andrew Marvell (1621-78)’s most famous poem, which was published posthumously in 1681, may well have been written many years earlier. in the early 1650s: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_His_Coy_Mistress (viewed 17 March 2025).

³ For William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and temporality, see F. Turner, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time: Moral and Philosophical Themes in Some Plays and Poems (Oxford, 1971).

⁴ For John Keats (1795-1821), who did indeed die young, see variously R. Gittings, The Keats’ Inheritance (London, 1964); S. Coote, John Keats: A Life (London, 1995); and J.E. Walsh, Darkling, I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats (New York, 1999).

⁵ Alan Ginsberg (1926-97), Howl, written c. 1954-5 and first published in Howl and Other Poems (1956), after which the publisher was arrested and charged with obscenity. His subsequent acquittal greatly boosted sales: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl_(poem) (viewed 18 March 2025). For context, see too B. Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (New York & London, 1989).

⁶ For T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), see variously P. Ackroyd, T,S. Eliot: A Life (1984); L. Gordon, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (1998); and K.P. Kramer, Redeeming Time: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (Lanham, Md, 2007).

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MONTHLY BLOG 171, WHY ARE THERE NO GREAT JOKES ABOUT TIME??

5 March 2025/in Monthly Blog, Time/by Penelope J. Corfield

Well, why are there no great jokes about Time?¹ There are quite a few jokes about clocks and watches. They are not particularly funny … but they are certainly worth a gentle smile … like the following:

What kind of bugs live in clocks? Answer: Ticks!

Or how about this one: What do you say when you wear your watch on an aeroplane? Answer: Time flies!

Or how about this comedic question: What’s the problem with eating a clock? Response: Well, it’s very time-consuming!

All the same, those jokes are really about variants of time-keeping and time-measurement.² They may produce a smile or groan, in mock tribute to a bad joke. None, however, are designed to make people laugh and simultaneously think about the nature of temporality itself.

Time is far too huge, abstract, all-powerful and unstoppable to be amenable to local and immediate joking.

It’s a bit like trying to laugh about God. (If depicted, both the ‘Holy Father’ and ‘Old Father Time’ are characteristically shown as venerable old men, with long white beards, who are far too august, wise, and all-powerful to be easily teased). Thus there are lots of jokes (some of them offensive) about rival religious groups and practices, as well as about various spiritual leaders. But there are not so many quips about divine power in the abstract. Still, here’s one mini-story which made me smile:

An atheist scientist confronted God, saying; ‘We have figured out how to make a man’. God replied: ‘Okay – let me see you do it’. The scientist bent down and scooped up some earth. ‘Oh no’, objected God: ‘You must first make your own dirt’.

Asking about jokes makes one think about the purpose of comedy and making other people laugh. It’s a very human form of interaction. That is, quite a number of other mammalian species make sounds that are indicative of mirth. They do that typically in play and (in some cases) when being tickled. Furthermore, there have also been cases of orangutans in zoos, who have laughed mightily at magic tricks, performed before them by humans. Highly encouraging to magicians!³

No other species, however, use language to communicate humour, in the way that humans do. True, our humour does not always succeed. There are cultural and other variants that affect the reception of jokes and other forms of comedy. Nonetheless, humans use humour to laugh at the unexpected, to highlight the incongruous, to satirise one another, and to generate bonding through shared laughter.⁴

So humans laugh together. But not much about Time, or – more accurately – not much about the Time-Space continuum which frames the cosmos. It thus frames all human life and all humour too. Yet it’s just too vast and universal to be locally funny. That said, here is a final sally to raise a smile: Why did the crocodile eat the clock? Answer: To kill Time! [And did it succeed? No chance!]

ENDNOTES:

¹ Expanding further upon discussions in PJC, Time-Space: We Are All in It Together (London, 2025).

² For further examples, see J. Nasser, It’s About Time: An (Almost) Complete List of Time Jokes (2013).

³ See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_in_animals (viewed 27 Feb. 2025)

⁴ See variously: J. Morreall (ed.), The Philosophy of Laughter and Humour (New York, 1986); T. Garfitt and others (eds), The Anatomy of Laughter (Abingdon, 2005); R.A. Martin, The Psychology of Humour: An Integrative Approach (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); and E. Weitz, The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy (Cambridge, 2009).

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MONTHLY BLOG 170, WHY THINK ABOUT TIME-SPACE, NOT SPACE-TIME??

3 February 2025/in Monthly Blog, Time/by Penelope J. Corfield

Fig.1 The stunning Century Clock (built 2000) in Tianjin, NW China,
showing the giant clock, with a standard clock face,
encircled by carved signs of the Zodiac,
plus below the working machinery, and, out-stretched,
two giant arms, one holding the Sun,
the other the Moon.

Why think about Time-Space, instead of Space-Time? This BLOG, the second in my 2025 Time series, presents my answer.¹

The first significant point to note is that rethinking Space-Time as Time-Space does NOT entail refuting Einstein’s theory of relativity, formulated and elaborated in the years 1905-17.² Einstein himself did not use the term ‘Space-Time’. But in September 1908 his close intellectual ally (and former tutor), the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, highlighted the implications in justly famous terms:³

Henceforth Space by itself, and Time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

This striking declaration did not mean that there are no absolutes anywhere throughout the great cosmos. But the real absolute reality is nothing less than the integral union of Time and Space.

Following Minkowski, this reality then became known as the Space-Time continuum. And it is commonly abbreviated as Space-Time. Furthermore, given that Space is known to have three dimensions, it has encouraged the usage that specifies Time as ‘the fourth dimension’.⁴

Yet … a minority of philosophers, scientists, geographers and historians are unhappy with that version of the core terminology. They fully accept the union of Time and Space. But they consider that all-encompassing, uni-directional, and unfolding Time is a much mightier phenomenon than simply one dimension of Space, such as height, width or depth. Therefore they use the alternative formulation of ‘Time-Space’ as a more accurate rendering of the partnership.⁵

It gives priority to Time, which is the dynamic component within the continuum. And it leaves Space fully in the integral partnership – but not as the lead phenomenon. Instead, Space, with its three dimensions, is the splendid physical manifestation of Time.

Moreover, the mighty phenomenon of Time, which embraces the entire cosmos, has its own highly complex characteristics.⁶ It is not in any way simply a one-dimensional adjunct of Space.

In one way, Time-Space as a concept is hard to visualise. (In another way, it is not hard at all. Just look at the world around you: that’s Time-Space in integrated action).

However, illustrating the conceptual linkages is somewhat trickier. In that context, it’s good to look again at the stunning Century Clock (2000), located in the port city of Tianjin in NW China (see Fig.1, above). It was not built specifically to show the links between Time and Space. But, imaginatively, it does. The centrepiece is the gigantic clock, marking Time. Its mechanical works, including a large swinging pendulum, are visible below. And outstretched are two huge metalwork arms – one holding the Sun, the other the Moon. Thus Time appears as the dynamo, while its power in action holds together the unsleepingly ‘restless universe’.⁷

And, for those who like to think poetically, here are the evocative words of the seventeenth-century Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan:⁸

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world
And all her train were hurl’d.

Beautiful! With more to follow in next month’s BLOG, on why all this matters …!

ENDNOTES:

¹ For further discussion, see PJC, Time-Space: We Are All in It Together (published by Austin Macauley: London, forthcoming 21 Feb. 2025), pp. 98-102.

² See A. Einstein (1879-1p55), Relativity: The Special and General Theory, transl. R.W. Lawson (New York, 2005). For context, see too R. Stannard, Relativity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2008).

³ H. Minkowski (1864-1909), Address on ‘Space and Time’, given to 80^th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians (21Sept. 1908), cited in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Minkowski (viewed 1 Feb. 2025)

⁴ There are numerous literary and cultural references to Time as the ‘fourth dimension’, such as N. Calder, Timescale: An Atlas of the Fourth Dimension (New York, 1983); R. Rucker, The Fourth Dimension: Towards a Geometry of Higher Reality (1^st pub. 1984; republished with this title, Garden City, NY, 2014); and D. Roy, The Fourth Dimension: Enigma of Time (Irvine, Calif., 2021).

⁵ See e.g. N. Thrift and J. May (eds), Timespace: Geographies of Temporality (London 2001); T.R.. Schatzki, The Timespace of Human Activity: On Performance, Society and History as Indeterminate Teleology (Lanham, MD, 2010).

⁶ For more on this theme, see PJC, Time and the Shape of History (London, 2007); and summary in PJC, Time-Space, pp. 93-162.

⁷ M. Born, The Restless Universe (Glasgow & London, 1936); also N. Henbest and H. Couper, The Restless Universe (Frome & London, 1982).

⁸ H. Vaughan (1621-95), The World (1650), opening lines: in L.C. Martin (ed.), The Works of Henry Vaughan (Oxford, 1957)l and also available on-line: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45434/the-world (viewed 2 Feb. 2025).

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MONTHLY BLOG 169, GREAT CLOCKS OF THE WORLD

2 January 2025/in Monthly Blog, Time/by Penelope J. Corfield

Fig.1 Image of Water Clock from Classical Greece –
in which the passing of Time is measured by a regulated flow of water.

My theme for 2025 is Time – the universal subject.¹ So to kick-start the year, here are seven great clocks of the world – my personal selection out of the myriad of possible candidates.² These are all on public display (there are countless more in museums) – and drawn from all quarters of the globe.

The first is located in the Republic of Honduras, Central America. It adorns the Cathedral of Comayagua; it is also known as the Arab clock, since it was designed by Moorish clock-smiths in c.1100; and presented, later in the seventeenth century, by the King of Spain to the city of Comayagua in New Spain (present-day Honduras); and in 1711 relocated once more onto the newly completed-Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, where it remains. It is reportedly the world’s oldest continually functioning gear-clock. Its face [Fig.2] has a beautiful simplicity, whilst its gearing retains a wondrous complexity.

Fig.2 The Arab Clock (built c. 1100AD in Moorish Spain),
now adorning Comayagua Cathedral in Honduras – said to be the world’s oldest continually operating gear clock.

The second one comes from North America. It was designed by Thomas Jefferson and built in 1792 for his mansion on his plantation at Monticello, Virginia.³ Known as the Great Clock, it has two faces, the exterior one is visible to the wider world, while the elegant indoor face [see Fig.3] presides over the Great Hall. The clock is powered by the regular movement of two sets of cannonball weights, which descend below the clock into the cellar. These sinking weights drive the clock’s ticking – and the striking of a large time-keeping gong on the roof. Once a week, the weights have to be rewound with a special crank key, fitting into the winding mechanisms on the interior clock face: a task requiring a strong grip – and good balance to scale a special ladder.

Fig.3 The Elegant Interior Face of Thomas Jefferson’s Great Clock on his Virginia estate at Monticello:
the central dial shows the hours and minutes, while the small whirling dial marks the passing seconds.
Also visible are the two slots for the weekly rewinding of the cannonball weights,
whose steady and slow descent regulates the clock’s time-keeping.

Circling around the world onto the massive Eurasian continent, the third great clock is to be found in Moscow. It’s a majestic beacon, devised to be seen from afar. Accordingly, the Kremlin Clock (also known as the Kremlin Chimes) is huge, its four faces displayed on the Spasskaya Tower within Moscow’s fortified Kremlin complex [see Fig.4]. Clocks were located there in the sixteenth century; and many updatings have followed. The current Kremlin Clock was designed in 1851; repaired in 1917-18, when a giant gold-plated lead pendulum was installed; restored again in 1932, when the Clock’s hands and numerals were gilded; and majorly restored again in 1974. Historically, the Clock was associated with regular chimes, though there have been periods when the bells were silent. Currently, the bells chime before the quarters and hours are struck – and play a tune, every three hours, on the hour. Compelling!

Fig.4 The majestic Kremlin Clock, also known as the Kremlin Chimes, adorns the imposingly decorated Spasskaya Tower (first built in 1491; restored 2015)on the east wall of the Kremlin complex, overlooking Red Square in central Moscow. Not only can the Clock be seen from afar but the 23 bells in the uppermost belfry serenade the city with specified tunes every three hours.

Swooping southwards and slightly westwards after that, the fourth great timepiece has its home in Cape Town. It’s also a beacon clock, located on the waterfront. The Clock Tower was built in 1882, and used initially as the Port Captain’s Office. The Victorian-Gothic edifice had a tidal gauge on the ground floor; and it also included a reading room, where ships’ captains could gather to catch up with the latest maritime news. The Clock itself was built in Edinburgh and installed high on the Waterfront Tower [see Fig.5], which had begun to lean ominously to one side – but has recently been righted. Scintillating!

Fig.5: Cape Town’s Waterfront Clock Tower was constructed in 1882, when its clock, built in Edinburgh,
was first installed. The Victorian- Gothic edifice (adopted as a National Monument in 1978)
was treated to a thorough restoration in the 1990s, when the outer walls were repainted in the original bright red.

The next move, to find my fifth great clock, travels significantly north-eastwards, across the Indian Ocean, to Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. There stands the utterly imposing Husainabad Tower, which is India’s tallest clock tower [see Fig.6]. It was constructed in steel and stone in 1881, to a design by the visionary architect Richard Roskell Bayne ⁴ – his architectural style fusing both Victorian and Mughal features. The great Clock is regulated by a gigantic pendulum; it has a sweet chime; and its clock-face, with the usual numerals and hands pointing to the hours and minutes, also has a floral outer frame, which removes any severity from the timepiece. Enchanting!

Fig.6 The towering splendour of the Husainabad Clock Tower
at Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India – the superb night-time illuminations
showcasing the Tower’s eclectic architectural styling and its floral-framed Clock.

Journeying ever eastwards (and slightly northwards), the search then brings us to the sixth great clock – this time in the Chinese city of Tianjin, on the coast south-east of Beijing. This is the Century Clock (built 2000). It is situated in the centre of a traffic roundabout near to the central station. This clock also represents fusion – between standard global Time – and traditional astronomical Time. Around the clock face, are the carved representations of twelve signs of the Zodiac. At the top is set Aries, as it brings good luck according to historic Chinese convention. The sculpture is visually stunning, with two massive metal-frame arms flung akimbo – one holding the Sun, the other the Moon – with the giant clock in the middle, and a huge swinging pendulum below [see Fig.7]. Its impact is equally stunning in daylight and when floodlit at night, Wham!

Fig.7 The stunning Century Clock (built 2000) in Tianjin, northwest China,
showing the giant clock, with a standard clock face, encircled by carved signs of the Zodiac,
plus below the working machinery, and, out-stretched, two giant arms,
one holding the Sun, the other the Moon.

And finally, returning westwards, across the extended continental landmass of Eurasia, the journey ends in Berlin, Germany. My final choice is my personal favourite. It is not strictly out-of-doors. But it is located in a public space – not in a museum. It’s the Clock of Flowing Time (1982),⁵ standing three floors high, within the open atrium at Berlin’s Europa Center [see Fig.8]. As its name implies, it is a water clock; and its mechanisms are regulated by the circulating flow of brightly-coloured water within its spheres and tubes. There is no standard clock-face. But onlookers can learn to gauge the time according to the number of spheres filled at any given moment. The whole system operates on a twelve-hour cycle, the spheres all emptying together at noon and midnight, before the sequence resumes once more. Non-Stop, Ever-Flowing Time! Poetic!

So many ways to tell the time.

So universal the quest … More next month!

Fig.8 The Clock of Flowing Time in Berlin’s Europa Center –
hard to explain, hard to photograph effectively
but intensely evocative of the non-stop flow of Time.

ENDNOTES:

¹ P.J. Corfield, Time-Space: We Are All in It Together (forthcoming February 2025).

² C. Jagger, The Great Clocks and Watches of the World (London, 1977; and later edns).

³ For Monticello, now a UNESCO-listed World Heritage site, see S.R. Stein, The World of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (New York, 1993); and, for sober context, L. Stanton, ‘Those Who Labor for my Happiness’: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (Charlottesville, VA., 2012).

⁴ R.R. Bayne (1836-1901), who was born in Warwickshire and died in British Columbia, had a prolific building career in India, designing not only workday railway stations but also numerous monumental buildings. A significant collection of his architectural designs and plans is held by the University of Victoria (B.C.) and this material may one day provide the basis for a good biography. See A Welch and others, ‘Building for the Raj: Richard Roskell Bayne’, RACAR, 34/2 (2009). pp. 74-86: https://www.racar-racar.com/uploads/5/7/7/4/57749791/_racar_34_2_06_welchseggerdecaro.pdf.

⁵ The clock was constructed to a design by the French physicist and artist, Bernard Gitton (b.1935), who has created numerous artistic and ingenious water-clocks. For context, see R. Lamb, ‘How Water-Powered Clocks Work’ (c.2009-10), in 2024 website: https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/sustainable/water-powered-clock2.htm.

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MONTHLY BLOG 168, ANTWERP DIAMONDS: THREE BEAUTIFUL ASPECTS OF ANTWERP – DIAMOND CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

1 December 2024/in Civics, Monthly Blog/by Penelope J. Corfield

Fig.1 An Antwerp diamond ring –
symbol of the great City of Diamonds

Well, I didn’t get my diamond ring. But, better still, I became acquainted with a great and enchanting city- which I’d never visited before. (Even though it is quite near to my home-town of London – 196 miles (315km) as the crow flies – and readily accessible by the Eurostar train network).

The Conference that I attended in Antwerp on ‘Time and Prophecies’ was productive and stimulating (see BLOG/167 November 2024). And my partner Tony and I extended our stay in order to have some extra time to enjoy the city life. Here are my three personal diamonds.

Firstly, Antwerp has a number of superb art museums – commemorating the Flemish artistic tradition, which dates back to the sixteenth century. If you like any combination of the works of Rubens, Van Dyck, and the Pieter Breugels (Elder & Younger), plus many others, then Antwerp is the art-capital for you.

My personal favourite is the Printing-House Museum (Plantin-Moretus Museum) in the Friday Market.¹ It is housed in the former residence-cum-printing establishment of two sixteenth-century printers. The exhibits take visitors through all the stages of printing, from setting the type, to printing the text, to viewing priceless historic books, and admiring handsome libraries with wooden shelves from floor to ceiling – crammed with yet more books. And all these exhibits are accompanied by the heavy creaking of the house’s original wooden floors. One cannot glide around this Museum in silence. Instead, all the visitors make and share the creaks and groans of the wooden flooring, as it has creaked and groaned since the sixteenth century.

Next, my second diamond must be the criss-crossing streets and squares in the centre of old Antwerp.² These are surrounded by town houses of all eras, which co-exist harmoniously together in a veritable architectural historian’s delight. And, most importantly, city planning policy has ensured that the central residential area is dominated by town houses of five or six storeys – rather than by twentieth-century tower blocks. Churches and the impressive Cathedral thus rise above the dense town housing in an intimate, neighbourly way.

Added to that, many of the central streets are semi-pedestrianised. Consequently, they are chaotically crammed with a hotch-potch of walkers, cyclists, scooters. trams, buses, a few slow-moving cars, and a rare but highly artistic horse-drawn carriage.

Antwerp pedestrians therefore get a really good impression of what it must have been like to walk the streets of a sixteenth-century city centre. Admittedly, the transport technology has changed somewhat over the intervening years. Admittedly, too, there are no ubiquitous piles of horse manure as might have been expected in the days when transport was al horse-drawn. Nonetheless, the hustle and bustle of city life, on an intimate and accessible scale, is excellently well-conveyed by central Antwerp. Top spot in all this urban beauty? Walking round the busy GroenPlaats square, gazing up at the soaring Cathedral nearby, listening to the street buskers and their accordions, dodging the traffic, and patting the nose of a large, handsome and patient black horse, awaiting passengers seeking a ride in his antique carriage.

So what then is my third diamond? Reference might justly be made at this point to Antwerp’s shops and markets; to its huge variety of bars and restaurants; as well as its many monuments; and to its riverside walk (in process of upgrading) by the broad expanse of the River Scheldt.

But my third diamond is awarded to a rare gesture of social recognition. It is a sculpture in the heart of the city – located at the foot of Antwerp’s impressive Gothic Cathedral – close to its main entrance. That great building’s construction began in 1352; and since then, the church has undergone numerous repairs and reconstructions.³ And the unusual sculpture shows four men at work. The gesticulating figure is the architect; and the others represent the unsung builders who raised the immense edifice. Well done to the Belgian sculptor Jef Lambeaux! Very well done, to the Cathedral authorities who presumably commissioned the piece! And excellently well done to the entire building workforce! Respect! Diamonds all round!

Fig.2 Statue Commemorating Achievements of
Antwerp Cathedral Workforce (1935):
located at foot of Cathedral, close to Main Entrance –
photo © Tony Belton October 2024

ENDNOTES:

¹ Since 2005, this Museum has been listed by UNESCO as a World-Heritage site. For its own website, see https://museumplantinmoretus.be/en; plus the survey in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantin%E2%80%93Moretus_Museum (viewed 30 Nov. 2024).

² See e.g. C. Stahl (ed.), The Flaneur: Walking through Antwerp (2019) – multi-lingual edition.

³ See P. Rynck, The Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp (Ghent, 2005).

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MONTHLY BLOG 167, HICKORY DICKORY DOCK!

1 November 2024/in Monthly Blog, Time/by Penelope J. Corfield

Hickory Dickory Dock/
The Mouse Ran Up the Clock
@https://www.indiaparenting.com/hickory-dickory-dock.html (2024)

While last month’s Conference in Norwich was evoked by the genially-smiling ‘Man in the Moon’, this month another meeting in Antwerp set me chanting ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’. The words are absurdly simple. The mouse ran up the clock! The clock struck the hour! And then the mouse ran down again!

But this basic rhyme records the perennial human fascination with telling the Time; and it illustrates, specifically, how adults sought to familiarise young children with the steady rhythms of a ticking clock. (The earliest recorded version of this rhyme dates from 1744, in a great era of British clock-building).¹

And amusingly, today’s globally popular social media platform for sharing short videos (invented in China in 2016) is named … Tik Tok.²

Getting to grips with Time is the underlying theme of the Antwerp Conference to which I will be contributing. Specifically, it focuses upon the history of forecasting the future. Here there is endless scope.³ Optimists see unfolding glories. Pessimists, by contrast, forecast the inevitability of total gloom and doom. (It’s not so exciting to prophesy simply ‘More of the same’).

However, while full details of the future remain unknown, the scope is constantly being restricted by serious scientific calculations. Thus the expected lifespan of our local Sun (the focal source of all life on Planet Earth) is now put at some 5 billion years. Then it will run out of hydrogen, and turn into a ‘red giant’, getting steadily larger and cooler.⁴

Alternatively, when will the Milky Way (in which our solar system is located) collide with the Andromeda Galaxy, within the regular processes of slow cosmic transformation? No need to wait so long for some highly spectacular local excitement. This predicted collision will occur in approximately 4.5 billion years from now. Stars will be thrown into new and unpredictable orbits.⁵ Any humans still around to experience this cosmic collision will have to hold onto every seat-belt in sight.

Of course, soothsayers and prophets are not required to accept these cool, scientific calculations, either in whole or in part. They are free to predict the end of the world anytime – sooner or later. They often build their cases upon their readings of scriptural texts.⁶ And Doomsday cults not infrequently spring up around those prophets who thunder out their apocalyptic warnings with emphatic relish.⁷

The terrain for future predictions is, however, getting crowded. Secular reports of scientific explorations of Near and Deep Space now jostle with more rapturous and/or more terrifying formulations. And, while many of these predictions are projected safely far into the future, some are more immediate. Scientists today, for example, calculate that the regularly orbiting Halley’s Comet will return into view from Planet Earth in late spring/early summer 2061.⁸ Let all those of us, who currently can, wait and (literally) see …

Plenty of big themes therefore to keep the Prophecies Conference busy in Antwerp in mid-November 2024. It’s not hard to predict a lively and intellectually stimulating event. And, since the due-date is sufficiently near, the participants will be able to confirm Yes/No by late November. The clock is ticking, though currently I see no mouse in attendance …

ENDNOTES:

¹ I. and P. Opie (eds), The Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes (1997 edn.), pp. 185-6. See also for context, J. McKenna, Watch, Clock and Dial-Makers of Birmingham, 1547-1900 (1988); and Anon., A Complete History of English Clock and Watch Makers (2011).

² For a full and not uncritical account see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok (viewed 20 Oct. 2024).

³ For approaches to studying Time, see PJC, Time and the Shape of History (2007); and PJC, Time-Space: We Are All in It Together (forthcoming 2024/2025).

⁴ See P. McHurrin in https://askanearthspacescientist.asu.edu/top-question/sun-dying (viewed 20 Oct. 2024).

⁵ Consult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision (viewed 20 Oct. 2024).

⁶ See many examples in R. Abanes, End Time Visions (1998); and E. Weber, Apocalypses (1999).

⁷ R.L. Snow, Deadly Cults: The Crimes of True Believers (2003).

⁸ P. Lancaster-Brown, Halley and his Comet (1985); P. Moore and J. Mason, The Return of Halley’s Comet (1984); and, contextually, A.A. Siddiqi, Beyond Earth: A Chronicle of Deep Space Exploration (2018).

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MONTHLY BLOG 166, WHY DID THE MAN IN THE MOON – WHO CAME DOWN TOO SOON – ASK HIS WAY TO NORWICH?

2 October 2024/in Monthly Blog, Personal/by Penelope J. Corfield

The man in the moon,
Came down too soon,
And asked his way to Norwich;
He went by the south,
And burned his mouth
By eating cold plum porridge.

It’s a charming nursery rhyme, with many minor variants in the wording. This version is the one that I knew and loved as a child. Song historians like to point out hidden messages in such traditional verses, designed to amuse the adults who sang these songs to their unsuspecting offspring.

Yet, in this case, the experts conclude that the words of ‘The Man in the Moon’ probably do not convey any secret meaning. They are simply agreeable nonsense, in which the City of Norwich features primarily to rhyme with ‘porridge’. Children would enjoy the thought of the Man in the Moon actually coming down to visit Planet Earth. And they would laugh at the upside-down qualities of the lunar traveller whose mouth was burned by cold food. Suitably weird!

Only much later did I think more specifically about the role of Norwich, when I began my doctoral research on that city’s fascinating history.¹ I quickly realised that, throughout many earlier eras in British history, it would not have seemed at all surprising that the Moon Man should want to visit the East Anglian capital.

For many centuries, after all, Norwich was one of Engand’s leading provincial capitals.² It had famously lively inhabitants, who were known for their readiness to express radical views – whether by popular riots or by voting for radical candidates in eighteenth-century parliamentary elections. And the city lay at the heart of a major textile-producing area, making the famous ‘Norwich stuffs’ [light worsted cloths]. In other words, Norwich was an urban Manchester-equivalent, long before Manchester itself boomed in the nineteenth century to become a great Northern regional capital and the new ‘Cottonopolis’ of the world.³

All these thoughts came flooding into my mind as we approach October and I prepare to travel to Norwich to talk to a Conference – later in the month – on the city’s historic appeal. I hope that the Man in the Moon gets to join us. And I will take care not to dine on cold plum porridge, just in case …

ENDNOTES:

¹ I.A. Opie (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951); A. Jack, Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes (2010); L.K. Alchin, The Secret History of Nursery Rhymes (2013).

² P.J. Corfield, ‘Norwich on the Cusp: From Second City to Regional Capital’, in C. Rawcliffe and R.G. Wilson (eds), Norwich since 1550 (2004), pp. 139-66. Also published within PJC website: see https://www.penelopejcorfield.com/pdf26.

³ I. Beesley, Victorian Manchester and Salford (1988); S. Hylton, A History of Manchester (2003).

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MONTHLY BLOG 165, HOW DID BENJAMIN FRANKLIN DISCOVER THE POWER OF LIGHTNING?

2 September 2024/in Monthly Blog, Personal/by Penelope J. Corfield

During the summer months, I’m getting through big task after big task. I’m feeling increasingly happy. But right now I don’t want to compose a long BLOG. After all, there are no rules that specify how long a BLOG must be. It’s an optional thing, done to salute the world and (hopefully) not to be too boring. So for September 2024, here is one of my favourite jokes:

Q: How did Benjamin Franklin discover the power of lightning?

A: It just struck him.

No loud laughter required. But a pleasant smile would be good.
PS: For website showing in real time where lightning is striking world-wide, see https://www.lightningmaps.org/.

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MONTHLY BLOG 164, COPING WITH MULTI-PRESSURES

5 August 2024/in Monthly Blog, Personal/by Penelope J. Corfield

This BLOG records my super-busy time in May/June/July 2024 and my tactic for coping. Before departing for a mini-break in western Ireland, followed by the annual ISECS-EC meeting ¹ – this year in Maynooth, near Dublin – every research task that I had ever placed in the ‘Futures’ pipeline came to fruition simultaneously and unexpectedly. My head span. I was psychologically upset.

By temperament, I am what is known as a ‘Taskie’ (‘Tasky’?), as opposed to a ‘Multi-tasker’. I really like to focus upon one job at a time. How then to cope with half a dozen large tasks, as well as lots of little ones, all of these being authentically urgent at the same time?

My first instinct was to take to my bed. I was exhausted in advance and wanted only to sleep. But every time I awoke, I felt even more agitated. The tasks still needed urgent attention … and the time for delivery had been shortened. I did not even try taking to the bottle, because I knew that recovering after a bout of heavy drinking would only make me feel much, much worse.

Well, there was only one thing for it. I had to compile a super-list, in which I ruthlessly prioritised all these tasks. I then sub-divided the list into groups, and dealt with one group at a time. The rule was then, whilst doing one group, not to think or worry about the others.² And, within each group, then to complete the tasks in the specified order. Otherwise, there’s an ever-present risk that the easy things get done and the trickier ones get endlessly postponed.

Once one group of tasks is done, then a short breather is allowed – before getting into the next group. It’s like climbing a mountain range by looking constantly at the intermediate peaks – and not staring all the time at the summit of Mount Everest.

In a nutshell, it’s compartmentalise – concentrate – complete … and, dear readers, I managed to finish all my urgent tasks before taking a break in Ireland. The weather was not brilliant but the lifting of multi-pressures, plus the glorious Irish greenery and unbeatable Irish hospitality, certainly was!

Roll on the next work crisis, if the finale is as pleasant … Do I really mean that?? I thought that retirement was supposed to be a period of calm and relaxation. Nevertheless, I seem to get busier and busier day by day. Oh well! Let’s make a list, compartmentalise … and look forward to the next big breather.

ENDNOTES:

¹ For the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies/ Société Internationale, see https://oraprdnt.uqtr.uquebec.ca/portail/gscw031?owa_no_site=304.

² Having written this BLOG, I then checked on the web, under the heading of too-many-things-to-do-all-at-once, and discover that this method of grouping tasks together is called ‘Chunking’. Glad to know that others are playing in the same ball-park. For a more elaborate version, see https://www.tonyrobbins.com/blog/power-of-chunking (viewed 30/7/2024). ‘Chunking’ is also used as a technique for improving human memory: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking (psychology) (viewed 30/7/2024).

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MONTHLY BLOG 163, DO PARTISAN IDENTITIES ADD A PLEASANT FLAVOUR TO DAILY LIVING – OR DO THEY REALLY CONSTITUTE A TRAP THAT UNDERMINES TRUE HUMAN SOLIDARITY?

2 July 2024/in Civics, Monthly Blog/by Penelope J. Corfield

Fig.1: Shutterstock (2024) – Tug of War

This BLOG is copy of my review, published in The Political Quarterly, Vol. 95/2 (April-June 2024), pp. 376-77, under the title ‘Uniting the Human Race’.

The book under review = Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap:A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (Allen Lane, London, 2023), pp. 401. See link = http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.13393.

Note: I was invited by the journal to contribute this review, since I have already written on the subject of ‘Identities’ in one of my most widely read and quoted BLOGs to date.¹

The truth is that all individuals have more than one identity. They can be classified under many headings – whether by age, citizenship, class, education, ethnicity, gender, intelligence, language, region, religion, or sexuality … to name some commonly invoked criteria. If an identity is chosen voluntarily – for example as fan of a football club or pop group – it can be a delightful thing to own and to share with fellow fans. How much importance to attach to this identity then becomes a matter of choice.

Yet, if one special aspect of an individual’s existence is singled out and harshly attacked, then that one identity can quickly become all-preoccupying – whether in defiant pride or fearful resentment. Subjective emotions quickly overtake dispassionate analysis. Little wonder that political campaigners often appeal to simplified sectoral identities – and stoke the stereotypes, to keep the polemical fires burning. Human solidarity is undermined.

That danger is the core message of Yascha Mounk’s new book on The Identity Trap. He himself is of Polish parentage, born and reared in Germany, educated in Britain and the USA, and currently working in the USA. As a result, he lives with the complexities of identity. He has described himself, for example, as a native German-speaker who never felt at home in Germany. And in this book, he takes up his pen to warn the world against crude over-simplifications.

Mounk’s writing style is chatty and accessible. Each chapter ends with a useful list of key points. At the same time, his arguments are buttressed by ample documentation. His purpose is deadly serious.

An opening peroration explains both ‘the lure and the trap’ of identity politics (pp.1-21). The story gathers force by examining the American Civil Rights movement of the1960s. Insofar as the book has a (muted) hero, he is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. He sought to forge an ecumenical campaign, endorsed by people of all skin colours and backgrounds. In his famous speech ‘I have a Dream’ (August 1963), he expressed the hope that one day: ‘little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls’. A colour-blind universalism and egalitarianism will prevail.

However, some colleagues began to fear that King’s soaring idealism lacked hard-edged realism. They called instead for ‘Black Power’ to deliver a more immediate route to remedy injustices. And, over time, as progressive reforms came only slowly, others on the American political Left began to lose faith in universalist solutions to deep-rooted inequalities.

Accordingly, Part 1 of this book (pp. 23-81) examines the genesis of what Mounk calls the ‘identity synthesis’, whereby universalist/liberal values are exchanged for sectional ‘affinities’. After the Second World War – with the growing awareness of the Holocaust and the advent of the atomic bomb – faith in grand visions of the progressive unfolding of history began to falter. Thinkers like Michel Foucault (1926-84) argued that knowledge systems were nothing more (or less) than expressions of power. And Jean-François Lyotard (1924-98) proclaimed, equally firmly, that the era of ‘Modernity’ had ended. Instead, people were living in a new ‘Age of Postmodernity’, in which absolute values were yielding to relative ones.

Critics of universalism thus argued that legal systems were not benevolently impartial. They were instead ‘cloaks for privilege’. One radical maxim stated that ‘Neutrality is political’. Another declared that: ‘Racism is permanent’. Action to help society’s most disadvantaged groups (especially those defined by race, gender and sexuality) was urgently needed. Separate ‘identities’ were thus not to be denied. Instead, they were to be embraced – and each group should be helped separately, secure in the validity of its own ‘lived experience’. A ‘proud pessimism’ (pp. 69-71) had arrived.

After that, Mounk devotes Part 2 (pp. 83-126) to demonstrating how the ‘identity synthesis has swept through American Universities – and begun to influence corporate, philanthropic, and political life as well. The impact of social media simultaneously encourages the sharing of confessional narratives. In addition, Mounk notes the human capacity for ‘group think’, especially on emotive issues. Furthermore, the Presidency of Donald Trump fuelled a surge of frustration and anger amongst the American political Left. Radical zeal was channelled into immediate campaigns on the ‘identity’ frontier, where local successes could raise morale.

Having recognised the ‘lure’ of identity politics, Mounk turns in Part 3 (pp. 129-235) to refute its claims. Here he pulls no punches. The ‘identity synthesis’ has too many internal contradictions to constitute a coherent philosophy. For a start, disadvantaged people do not always agree among themselves. Then societies are not all perennially divided into mutually uncomprehending groups. There is much overlapping and sharing. Thus it is historically erroneous to think that each type of cultural output belongs exclusively to one specific group and cannot be adopted or adapted by others. Moreover, a ‘cancel’ culture that halts free discussion of such issues risks fuelling despotism rather righting injustices.

Building upon those criticisms, Mounk in Part 4 (pp. 239-90) ends with a rousing defence of liberal democratic values. With care and empathy, people can understand and help one another. Universalist programmes to provide good health care, housing, education, job opportunities, access to transport, peaceful neighbourhoods, and freedom from discrimination, can – given time and commitment – work wonders. ‘Progressive separatism’ is not actually progressive. Instead, it inculcates a negative pessimism.

These debates are likely to continue. But Mounk now detects a growing readiness among critics of the ‘identity synthesis’ to voice their objections – as he has decided to do in this admirably thoughtful book.

In that spirit, this reviewer wishes to add one further point that is not fully covered by Mounk. At one stage (p.100), he cites (disapprovingly) the case of an eminent American University where students are discouraged from stating that: ‘There is only one race, the human race’. Elsewhere, too, Mounk refers to racial classifications as ‘dubious’ (p. 262).

But let’s be franker. The attempt at establishing a so-called ‘scientific racism’ led into an intellectual blind alley. Experts could not even agree on the number of separate ‘races’. Today, geneticists confirm that all people carry variants of one biological template, known as the human genome.² Hence individuals from all branches of the human family can inter-marry and breed fertile offspring – the fundamental test of one common species. Mounk does himself refer to the ever-growing number of so-called ‘mixed-race’ individuals (p.14), who do not fit into simple ‘racial’ classifications. But are they fully human? Of course, they are.

True, some people today maintain strongly racist attitudes. That’s an urgent problem for societies to address. Yet it’s not a good reason for endorsing the separatists. Humanity must avoid the ‘identity trap’ and walk with Martin Luther King. He sought to transform: ‘the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood’ [or: siblinghood!] King was brutally cut down in his prime. But his cause and his optimism are needed today more than ever. Can the human family get its global act together, at this time of climate crisis? That’s another huge and urgently-unfolding story … but anyone immediately seeking a measured faith in liberal human universalism should read Yascha Mounk.

ENDNOTES:

¹ PJC, ‘Being Assessed as a Whole Person: A Critique of Identity Politics’, BLOG no.121 (Jan. 2021).

² See esp. L. Cavalli-Sforza and F. Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution (London, 1996).

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MONTHLY BLOG 172, CAN YOU NAME FIVE STRIKING POEMS ABOUT TIME??

MONTHLY BLOG 171, WHY ARE THERE NO GREAT JOKES ABOUT TIME??

MONTHLY BLOG 170, WHY THINK ABOUT TIME-SPACE, NOT SPACE-TIME??

MONTHLY BLOG 169, GREAT CLOCKS OF THE WORLD

MONTHLY BLOG 168, ANTWERP DIAMONDS: THREE BEAUTIFUL ASPECTS OF ANTWERP – DIAMOND CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

MONTHLY BLOG 167, HICKORY DICKORY DOCK!

MONTHLY BLOG 166, WHY DID THE MAN IN THE MOON – WHO CAME DOWN TOO SOON – ASK HIS WAY TO NORWICH?

MONTHLY BLOG 165, HOW DID BENJAMIN FRANKLIN DISCOVER THE POWER OF LIGHTNING?

MONTHLY BLOG 164, COPING WITH MULTI-PRESSURES

MONTHLY BLOG 163, DO PARTISAN IDENTITIES ADD A PLEASANT FLAVOUR TO DAILY LIVING – OR DO THEY REALLY CONSTITUTE A TRAP THAT UNDERMINES TRUE HUMAN SOLIDARITY?

Penelope J. Corfield

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