A Timley Transformation

Today’s Agenda:

Discussion of Presentation Comments and Expectations (5-7 min)

Journal:

For the next ten minutes, I want you to write on the following subject:

Are you generally on time for events? Or are you chronically late? Describe to me what it is like for you to be someone who is either always, or mostly, on time, or someone who is never, or rarely, on time. Why are you the way you are?

Group Discussion:  (5-7)

Where do you see yourself in Five, Ten, and Twenty years? What kind of person will you be? Where will you live? What will you do for work? What are some of your personal goal during these periods?

Mini-Lecture:

• We talked about changes in language and how that affected daily life
• There was a bigger transformation though.

Last time, we talked about some of the important issues that began to develop during this period as a result of changing understandings of language, and the importance of language in daily life. Well, during this period there was an even bigger transformation, and that was a transformation in peoples’ understanding of time.

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• This change relates to changing notions of time

• You may have noticed references in the Knight’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s tale, and Columbus’ Diary to time.

• When we see these things, we make assumptions that these authors would not have made.

In The Knight’s tale, you may remember that there were several references to time, people went away for a period of a year, or seven years. In The Wife of Bath’s tale, we also have  a year – the time that it takes the Knight to find the answer to the question, “What women want.” When we were reading Christopher Columbus’ diary, we also saw that he kept a calendar, and that this calendar appears to mark off the days of his time in North America. Well, when you or I read about these things, we make several assumptions that Dante, Chaucer, and Christopher Columbus – not to mention many, many people living during this time, would not have made.

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• When we see references to time, we automatically presume the following: that it relates to a system of years, days, months, and seconds that is endlessly adding up.

When we see references to time, we assume that it corresponds to something like the following system: Years are 365 days long, and each day is made up of 24 hours, and each hour is made up of 60 minutes, and each minute is made up of 60 seconds. We also assume that we are all continually moving though time, that is, the seconds are always adding up, the minutes are always adding up, the days are always adding up, and so are the years.

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• We have developed this time system to make sense of the endless physical and biological changes and cycles that define our world

• Hours carve up the day

• The week organizes work and rest

• Minutes help organize the minutia of our personal lives and help us plan

• It is a way to organize a universe that, itself, does not have an obvious time system of its own. We may no know why everything happens, but we ALWAYS know WHEN it happens.

For you and I, our movement through time is largely the produce of physics and biology: the world is full of physical and biological changes, and our way of marking time helps us order and understand these changes: For example, by carving the day out into 12 neat hours, we have a neat way of organizing and understanding the movement of the sun across our sky. By breaking the week into seven days, we have a neat and organized way of determining when the vast majority of people will work, and when they will rest. We use our time system as a way to organize and understand a natural world that, itself, does not have a time system.

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• This understanding of time is useful not only because it also helps us understand things as they are happening, but also because it helps us understand how things happened, and how they will happen.

• Birthday’s

• Anniversaries

• Sept 11

• What we will do on days on the week, or will do

• This entire system is based on the notion that things change, and that we need a way to keep track of the changes.

This understanding of time, which is based on managing and ordering change in the world, is useful not only for helping us understand why things are happening, but also why they happened, and what may happen in the future: we can associate events with specific numbers: Sept 11 for example, or birthdays or anniversaries, and this helps us understand the past. Similarly, it is a useful way for predicting the future. We know that in the future there will be Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesday, and – as know generally what we do on such days — we can generally predict where we will go as time changes.

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• Well, this understanding of time would have made NO SENSE to the authors we have read so far, and to the majority of the people living during the medieval period.

• True, they did have calendars, and even some hour-keeping devices, — however they felt that there was a very different reason for time that the physical changes and cycles that define our world.

Well, this understanding of time would have made no sense at all to the vast majority of people who lived during the medieval period. This is not to say that they did not have calendars – they did – or that they did not have rudimentary time-charting devices, the a compass – they did. However, unlike many of us, there felt that there was a very different reason for TIME than the simple physical and biological transformations we see endless occurring in our world.

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• They did not, as we do, think of the world in terms of past, present, and future.

• This is because they believed that an unchanging God was the reason for time and everything that happens, and if time was a representation or extension of God, it did not change either, so there was no real reason to think of it as something that was constantly developing or needed to be kept track up (how many clocks in the room?).

• This intellectual presumption was born out in their daily lives: born into a station, live and die in that station: you life was charted out for you. Moreover, your life would be the same as that of your parents, and your children would have the same life you have. (one reason no one knew what to do with orphans)

As radical as this may  sound – they did not think in terms of the past/ present/ and future.  This is largely because they believed that God created Time, and, as God is always perfect and complete, and does not change, that no meaningful distinctions could be made or imagined between the past present and future. Moreover, and on a much more particle level – they simply did not look for change in their lives the same way we do: you were generally born into a particular station in life, and you held that station for your entire life: from cradle to grave, your life was pretty much charted out for you. As your life was going to be the same as your parents, there was no real reason to see much difference between the two events,

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• Thus the past, present, future were basically the same

• However, as people began to travel they were confronted by the reality that there were different communities, and that these communities did change over time. Worse, when then came home, they saw that there own communities had changed in ways they had not expected. (Example of someone noticing that you have grown taller, when you have not noticed it yourself)

Thus, the past the present and the future were essentially the same, or presumed to be the same. If you believe this, there is no really pressing need for a clock or calendar. However, as people began to travel, then were confronted with a very difficult idea, which is that people and places and communities did change over time – when they left home and returned, they returned changed by their experience. Moreover, they saw their homes and their lives in different ways, and were aware of changes that OTHERS WERE NOT. For example, have you ever had the experience of someone who has not seen you for a long time saying, “My you have grown!” And you did not notice it before they mentioned it?

• If I understand the present differently than you, then I probably think about the past the future in different terms, too.

• So people during this period became increasingly dependent on the calendar and clock as a means for not simply marking time – as we see in Chaucer – but as a means for organizing time.

• With the clock, people living apart can find a common point to compare their lives with (it helps you imagine what your parents or brother and sisters or boyfriends and girlfriends are doing right now, even though they are not here with you).

This new understanding of the world and change was challenging people’s understanding of time. If I might understand the present differently from you, then that means that our understanding of the past, present, and future will also be different. It is out of this apparent chaos that we slowly turned to the calendar, and then the clock. The clock makes it so that – no matter where two people  are, and how different their experiences may be, they can associate one another with a common point in time: for example, you can probably imagine what your parents or brothers and sisters are doing right now.

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• This lead to what was a huge religious issue:

• If the Past/Present/Future is the same, no need to wonder about the history behind the Bible or God (and we already know that they were starting to question their Bibles). As we begin to understand the world through the clock, we are forced to ask: how did things get the way there are?

Well, this leads us to a HUGE religions issue. Consider: if you believe that the past, present, and future are the same, and are a religious person, then the history behind the Bible is not much of a problem for you, as you presume the events in the bible are always eternal and always applicable. However, once you begin to use chronological time to understand the universe, you have to wonder: how did things develop and get to where they are today?

This question lead to some major – and bloody – debates between Christians in Europe, and raised a whole bunch of Questions that we are going to look at later in this course. For now, however, what we need to know is that a man named John Milton was getting ready to step forward to deliver what he truly believed was a divinely-inspired explanation – the back story, if you will — of  how it is the world got so confusing in the first place, and what God’s relationship to man was.

Class Discussion of Journal entry

Homework:

Read handout and work on your presentations.

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