The Weight of Time

Cafe Society
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After considering some of HumbleServant’s excellent suggestions in this thread, I’ve decided to start a general book discussion of my own about the peculiar aspect of literature that obsesses me the most.

Time. Not just any time, but lots of time. An evocation of ages and civilizations past, to which people living in the present have scant access to and have little recourse but to lament their passing.

My favorite works of literature can evoke a tremendous sense of ages gone by using mysterious references, arcane language, and light-handed evocations of the crumbling material world. They are books that show without telling; they do not belabor the great age and majesty of things. Rather, they deal with such things gingerly, as though the author himself were trying and failing to access some hidden part of the human experience.

Books which simply say, “the crumbling old castle stood on the hill for so long no one knew how old it was” doesn’t do it for me.

The scene in The Two Towers in which the fellowship spies the weather-worn Pillars of Argonnath from a distance does.

So what books evoke a mysterious patchwork of history for you? Three stand out in my mind: one work is manifestly “fantasy,” one is usually called a work of “speculative fiction,” and the other is an epic poem.

With just a few literary flourishes, the The Lord of the Rings is able to evoke almost inexpressible ancient grandeur. Tolkien juxtaposes the sedentary, comfortable life of the hobbits, replete with tended gardens, pubs, and clocks, with endless stretches of abandoned countryside, filled with ancient hill-forts and the remains of battle. His linguistic virtuousity is unparallelled: even to those who understand no Quenya, mysterious references to people, places, and poetry foreground the ancient longing of the elven race.

Both following in a similar tradition yet radically departing from it is The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. He blends the ancient, the familiar, and the downright bizarre in a fascinating mosaic. Imbued in his society is the labyrinth of medieval Byzantium, the urban decay of the modern world, and thoroughly alien modes of thought and material culture. His own use of language is fascinating, though it can be considered crude compared to Tolkien’s. Wolfe is more precise, while Tolkien is more evocative.

It is difficult to bring out the grim depth of Beowulf in modern English. The timelessness of the mead-hall is powerfully conrasted with the short age of men and the ultimate worthlessness of their deeds. Interspersed through the poem are oblique references to forgotten days before and days after in which the deeds of the heroes are long forgotten. I read Beowulf as a lament on the weakness and transience of mankind.

So what books do it for you? Can you discuss how some of your favorites are able to convey the passage of time, the weight of age, and the death of civilizations?

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Being mostly an SF fan, a lot of my reading tends involve the far future and various permutations of time travel. However, one poem springs immediately to mind: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. It evokes a magical sense of time long past in a place that never was. Sigh…if he’d only been able to finish it.

Hodge

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Hi Maeglin. I like it! Three books and three themes mentioned–I can still respond despite not having read The Book of the New Sun.

And Hodge has mentioned Coleridge too–were you thinking of Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency where they time-travel back to pre-history and kill the alien who inspired Coleridge to write The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Adams is pretty good on the vastness of time and space both.

BTW, my favorite lines from Colergidge (“alone, alone, all, all alone”) are:

My lips were wet, my throat was cold,
My garments all were dank.
Sure I had drunken in my dreams
and still my body drank.

(Nothing to do with the op, but you give me a chance and I’ll contribute something by hell or high water!)

The Tolkien is a great example of the phenomenon. Tolkien is of course an excellent linguist and historian–he is acutely aware of our need for a past, and recognizes our basic desire that, despite the transience of each human, our cultures and ideas whould live on. In response to Tolkien’s ancient giant stones, let’s have more fantasy: two from C.S. Lewis. In one of the Narnia books, Lucy and Edmund (I think) are trying to look for clues to give them directions on how to get somewhere in a driving storm. They take shelter by walking along some sunken brickwork lanes. The lanes turn out to be giant letters carved in the ground. In Out of the Silent Planet, we get Merlin roused from slumber from under an old well, along with sentient badgers and other animals which have always seemed to me to evoke mysterious, ancient memories. The Once and Future King does something similar.

And Beowulf! “Hater of men, lonely roamer.” I read Beowulf a long time ago, and slept with the lights on while I did it. Beowulf is not only ancient of days, it may be the most frightening thing I have ever read–like memories of really bad dreams. The author does deal with it gingerly–like looking at it straight on instead of askance would call it into being right now. brrr.

E.R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses and George MacDonald’s Lilith are two others that get characterized this way in my head. Cyclops and Medusas and Gorgons too.

But, maybe I’m confusing really good horror with great gobs of time. Are there any happy books that do the trick?

Great thread Maeglin.

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The Silver Chair. Not the best of the Narnia books, but that scene is great. The characters were Eustace and Polly, and the words are “…Under Me”, and are the exact “words written in stone” they were warned to look for.

I thought of Beowulf, too, but I don’t remember how much of the ancientness was contemporary, so to speak. Anything in Beowulf is ancient just by virtue of being in a millenium-old story. Then again, I do recall that all of the “good stuff” dated from an earlier time (heirloom swords, and such).

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There were some bits in Vernor Vinge’s Deepness in the Sky and Fire Upon the Deep that conveyed a long span of years. It really drove home what it would be like to have a civilization spanning some 10,000 years.

I also had a similar (albeit a lesser) reaction when reading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which takes place very far in the future…millions of years, maybe?

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Thanks Chronos. Always nice to see your name in a thread about time.

And would someone please describe The Book of the New Sun a bit more for me? Now I’ve got to decide whether I want to read it.

The sense of a huge distance in time is often coupled with the shock of a huge culture gap. Celtic sensibility in particular seems to surprise us with its strangeness. Morgan Le Fay in the Arthur stories and Lady MacBeth and the three witches in Shakespeare seem to be the remnants of ancient ways–they coexist in time but not in culture.

Our real world is getting pretty old too. I’ve felt the shock of distance in the Lascaux cave paintings, the sphinx and even in seeing the occasional Greek statue/Roman copy that they still find in the shadows of the Mediterranean with bits of algae floating around it. So long ago, but so like us.

As Shelley said, in the very long term the sands of time will cover all civilizations.

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My first thought was Lovecraft, although I’m not entirely convinced that it fits the topic at hand. He had his ages and civilizations of long past, and almost all of his works had a reluctance to investigate them too deeply.

I wish I had the time to develop this more fully- sadly, work beckons- but unless someone beats me back to this, I’ll try to elaborate more, and throw out a few other examples from other authors.

Good thread, Maeglin.

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I’m sure one of the real Gene Wolfe fanatics will chime in with a better description, but I’ll give it the old college try:

Book of the New Sun revolves around the adventures of Severian, an apprentice executioner. He lives in a world so ancient, the sun is dying and red. Wolfe does a great job of conveying the atmosphere of a world that is too damn old for its own good. His narrative voice really needs to be read to be truly experienced. Read now. Why are you still here? :slight_smile:

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Some more texts with the weight of time felt heavily within them:

The Iliad

Seamus Heaney’s Bog poems

R.E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories

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Jorge Luis Borges is an Argentinian(?) writer who only wrote short stories, but many of his stories dealt with the infinite (infinite space and infinite time). Not exactly like the weight of time as in “omigod that’s so oooold!”, but similar IMO.

Absimia