It might be hot and humid again by the time this sees print, but I'm writing on a Wednesday in mid-August, and the temperature in downtown Little Rock this morning was 67 degrees F. A cool front brought us our first reprieve a few weeks ago, at the beginning of August, along with welcome rain. It heated up again, but now this merciful cool has arrived. The atmosphere is clear, with intimations of fall.
At least half a dozen flocks of geese flew over the Broadway Bridge last night toward the band of orange and pink over western Pulaski County. I passed a friend and we remarked on the weather. "I can take a walk," I started, and tugged at my sleeves. She finished my sentence: "without your clothes sticking to you." Yes. Palpable relief.
But there's more to it than the removal of physical discomfort. Much of the blessedness of these cool August days is in the anticipation they bring, and the sense that we are after all moving through time. We are not suspended forever in a realm of heat and uniform, bleaching light, and blockbuster movies with main characters based on acultural pink-clad plastic dolls who will persist in our landfills approximately forever. That was just a season.
The rabbi and scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel is best known in Southern history for joining Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis on the third March from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965. Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907 and studied at the University of Berlin. He was living in Frankfurt in 1938 when he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Poland. He was able to get to London six weeks before Germany invaded Poland and made it to New York in 1940. He lived and taught in the United States until his death in 1972.
A few weeks ago I picked up his 1951 book "The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man." If you're puzzled, as I am, by the relationship between space and time, if you understand that we go 'round and 'round in space but come up empty on the matter of where, if anywhere, we might be headed in time, I cannot recommend this little volume more.
If you're willing to accept poetry as a consolation for the limits of natural science (or your own grasp thereof), jump to the epilogue and find gems like this: "When we learn to understand that it is the spatial things that are constantly running out, we realize that time is that which never expires, that it is the world of space which is rolling through the infinite expanse of time."
Or "The boundless continuous but vacuous entity which realistically is called space is not the ultimate form of reality. Our world is a world of space moving through time--from the Beginning to the End of Days."
I don't know if they are verifiable, but those passages from Heschel soothed some undefinable dread that I've carried around since the mid-1980s, related to a nagging feeling that the way we talk about time, or the way I picture it, isn't quite right. What Heschel says might not be verifiable, but as poetry, as religious offering, I think it's true.
In the summer of 2004, Paul Greenberg attended the debut of the play "This is Martha Speaking," about Pine Bluff native Martha Beall Mitchell, famous for helping to bring down, in Greenberg's words, "a president of the United States who very much needed bringing down." But what caught my attention that long-ago summer was a remark about the sterility we encounter when we hunt for marks of the past in our new, generic, air-conditioned South.
"When scholars of Southern literature and life (which tend to blend) speak of a sense of place," he writes, "they're speaking not just of place but time. They're speaking of an awareness of the generations that have passed through this place and left their presence lingering. They're speaking of phrases that have gone out of the language, don't you know, yet keep being repeated. They're speaking, in short, of both the malice of time and its beneficence, and it's not always easy to tell which is which in these latitudes."
This is how modernity works, he writes: "We devise a genuine artificial, brand-new old New Jersey seaside town circa 1910, and set it down on the Gulf of Mexico in Florida to recapture the feel of the past. Then we wonder why it doesn't have the sense of place we were after. It's because it lacks the one essential ingredient of a sense of place: a sense of time. And that's the one element of architecture and life there is no substitute for."
For Heschel, time is eternity, the unchanging ultimate reality that we are passing through. For Greenberg, sense of place can only come from palpable or remembered or inherited evidence of our passage through time. Sense of place can only come from the markings and the impressions that accumulate over time.
Yes, we have to make new things--we're human, homo erectus fabricans--but we must remember that new things--new buildings, new trends, new technologies--tend to come without the weight we need to feel real; they are likely to leave us unsatisfied. Think of cotton candy and the festivals of the French Revolution, with its Cult of the Supreme Being, and be wary.
It's ironic that a new technology can interfere with our need to experience natural change and to develop a good sense of the passage of time, but blue light does it nightly and air conditioning does it seasonally, while television does it with almost no rhythm, just a persistent insistence that we stay tuned.
There is no inherent evil in a big screen or a little screen or an air conditioner; we've just got to be vigilant to make sure they don't get between us and a cool day in August.