At the top of my list of ‘projects I really wish I’d got around to finishing before it was too late’ is a piece on J.G. Ballard and historical time. I’m a massive Ballard fan, especially of his short stories, and I’ve always been struck by his concern with the human experience of time – explored above all by changing the things that we take for granted, such as when the earth ceases to rotate and it’s always early evening in Casablanca, or when the sleep trigger is artificially disabled in some experimental subjects, or when (for unknown reasons) people start to suffer from narcolepsy, their days getting ever shorter. Most striking – or maybe it’s just because it relates to my research interests in ecology – is his focus in the brilliant ‘The Voices of Time’ on the relation between human time and other times, not only geological time but cosmic time.
Posts Tagged ‘hope’
Waiting for the Great Leap Forward
Posted in Musings, tagged Fernand Braudel, hope, J.G. Ballard, time on February 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Sphinx 