A Dance to the Music of Time, by Nicolas Poussin, c. 1635.

A Dance to the Music of Time, by Nicolas Poussin, c. 1635. Wallace Collection, London.

Time

Volume VII, Number 4 | fall 2014

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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.

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Painting of a man in an office looking out of the window.

Strange Days

By Sven Birkerts

During convalescence it grows hard to tell the difference between when to pass the time and when to allow time to pass through.

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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

Along with an elephant whose name in Arabic meant “the father of intelligence,” Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid presented Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne with a mechanical clock powered by water in 807. At noon a weight dropped, bells sounded, and twelve brass horsemen emerged from twelve windows.

1849 | St. Petersburg

Under the Gun

Fyodor Dostoevsky is granted a stay of execution.More

1906 | Dunsany

Declaration of War

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

1742 | Welwyn

Toward the Precipice of Death

As Atlas groaned, the world beneath, we groan beneath an hour.More

Charts & Graphs

Chart showing the cost of items per minute.

Dollars per Minute

What it all costs, minute by minute.

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Engraving of William Shakespeare from the first folio edition.

Photograph of Jorge Luis Borges

Photograph of Lord Dunsany

Photograph of Colin Dickey standing in front of a brick wall.

Bust of Hesiod

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

Black and white photograph of E. B. White sitting at his typewriter with his dachshund.

St. Benedict

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

—Simone Weil, 1947

Portrait of Francis Bacon in sixteenth-century armor.

Black and white photograph of a young John Ruskin wearing a suit.

Sir Francis Bacon & John Ruskin

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