The Triple Time

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I wrote about To the Lighthouse a while ago.

I want to talk about it a bit more. Virgina Woolf’s treatment of time — and her attempt (I have no idea if it’s a conscious attempt) to depict more than one modality of it — is impressive.

In order to explain what are the three modes of time, I will use another writer that had made an impression on me: Father António Teixeira, a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest and astrology expert who wrote “Epítome das Notícias Astrológicas para a Medicina” (An Epitome of Astrological News for Medicine).

In his book, he describes the first “time”, Eternity, as it follows:

“If the being is immutable, which didn’t have a principle, nor can have an end (which happens only in Divine Essence), its duration is Eternity, of which Albert Magnus said it is a space that had no principle and won’t have an end; in which there is no priority nor posteriority, or any succession, but an infallible permanence in its being, or, as St. Augustine said, which is the true immutability”.

Here’s what he says of the second time, which he calls “Evo” (from aevum), Eviternity:

“If the duration is of the entity that had a principle and will not have an end, the time is the Evo; to which the Coimbra Course [to cut a long story short, these are notes from the Philosophy course in the College of Arts of Coimbra] defined as being that which is a duration of the created being, natural, which will last forever. With the Evo the Heavens and the Elements are measured”.

Lastly, this is what is to him the common time, the third type:

“The duration of the essences that had a principle and will have an end is measured by time”

Each of them, in a sense, determine the next one. Common time is the time of things that are born, grow, and die, the time of the Creation we live in. It is measured by Eviternity, the time of the Heavens, of things that came into existence but don’t die, or of repeating cycles, which make sense only in light of what never changes, Eternity.

Strictly speaking, Eternity is exclusive to God. Everything else had a beginning, but (as Father Teixeira explains), the Angels and the Saints enjoy it by participation, due to God’s Infinite Love.

We live in the third time… except we don’t, really.

Our bodies do; everything which we perceive in the world does, but the mind remembers the past, makes sense of the present, and imagines the future - it moves through time and transcends it. The soul won’t die, we are what joins eviternity and common time here, and we have the hope of somehow participating in Eternity.

But… what does it all have to do with Virginia Woolf?

Well, it appears that time was one of her main concerns.

While in Mrs Dalloway she moves — in a seemingly endless text, withouth chapters, running back and forth in time, joining thoughts of different people — in the mind, where the triple time, so to speak, coexists, in The Lighthouse she tries to describe the three.

We never experience eternity here, and we won’t really live in it. But the desire for eternity lies within us.

And that is the theme of the first part of the book, The Window.

The name is not without meaning. A window is not made for us to walk through, to act, but to observe.

In this part (which I have associated with the astrological angular houses somewhere else, because they’re what pins the Earth and the Heavens), she describes and explores possibilities, and relationships, and seeds of different life paths, without really making the characters take any of them. The book, after all, begins with a journey that doesn’t happen, that cannot happen. To go journey would be to move, to order things in before and after - to fall in time.

Dreams and hopes, past and future, seeds, possibilities, characters, all these are shown — in an isolated space, an island, removed from the mainland of time. A bubble in which time doesn’t pass.

But it always does. They go back to the mainland, to the flow of common time, in the second part, named, unsurprisingly, Time Passes, where things happen and happen fast. People marry, die, change, things decay and crumble. It’s interesting that the order here is “Eternity” → “Common time” → “eviternity”, we’re not in watching an academic lesson on time, but how we experience it; the longing for eternity and the inevitable fall into time as we suffer it in this world of generation and corruption. I once compared this part to the cadent houses.

Then, The Lighthouse.

In which we, as it were, go back to the seeds of the first part. The journey happens — in the direction of the Light and back, to a renewal of the cycle, as the Moon does. They’re in the sea, that gigantic mass of opportunities and dangers, also related to the Moon. Things are born, are remade, loose ends are tied. This has some similiarity to the succeedent houses of astrology, the transition between one cycle and the next.

Of course, they are still materially in common time. We don’t travel upwards, but our soul learns (or remembers) that, as the cycles of the Heavens are an imperfect reflection of eternity, our lives in time are a rememberance of the regeneration of the Aevum.

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I have had a problem with horse races.

They were banned from the betting sites I used for reference (even though I hadn’t been able to bet on them, I could assess them ok), and I couldn’t understand the racing sites. But I will, and the lillycoin saga will resume.

In the meantime: I cannot see what I did wrong in the last race. Either this is a flaw in the method (possible), the mistake is mine and is there but I can’t see it (probable), or the race was late and the beginning time was not the one I had (quite probable).

Anyway. See you soon.