Time, space, and our pandemic.

Hi friends,

Thought I’d link you to my essay on how the pandemic has changed our experience of time and space, and what that offers us. “The air is filled with birdsong now. It was always there, we just couldn’t hear it.” appeared n The Irish Times Magazine print edition, and is also now online. Here’s an excerpt:

“Suddenly apart, together. We’ve gone indoors, we’ve changed the dimensions of our lives, we’ve slowed down the weeks and agitated the days. It isn’t only the economy or the work day that’s changed since the virus: space feels different, time feels different.

Time inside and time outside aren’t lined up. Time might drag on indoors, and yet the landscape and news beyond the threshold could change, the way it does in winter, when you look out the window to discover the ground covered in white, the snow still coming down, surprising us in the quiet.

‘When we think of the world’s future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction,’ wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Now that our visions of the future have gone crooked, we can sympathise with him. He lived for time on the curve of Killary Harbour, and probably could not have predicted that we’d one day treat lines and curves, to chart and flatten, as the fortune tellers of the world. Like the creases on our palms, we stare into them to understand what’s next. Old ways of knowing the world overlap aesthetically with new ones. We say, ‘It’s in our hands.'”

Would you like to read the entire article? Well, here you go.

XO
CH

Tags: Conner Habib, occult, pandemic, Time and Space