By Sue Zemka
Surprising alterations, possibilities or revelations have constantly carried a unique value in western tradition, from the Greek and later the Christian kairos to Evangelical reports of conversion. This attention-grabbing booklet explores the ways that England, below the impact of industrializing forces and elevated precision in assessing the passing of time, connected value to moments and occasions that compress nice value into small devices of time. Sue Zemka questions the significance that modernity invests in short-term occasions, from faith to aesthetics and philosophy. She argues for a pressure in Victorian and early sleek novels serious of the values the age invested in moments of time, and means that such novels additionally provide a correction to modern tradition and feedback, with its emphasis at the temporary occasion as an enterprise of swap.
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At this point, it is clear that the late nineteenth-century discovery of the non-synchronicity of the human senses invalidated the notion of a pure or simple sensation on which associationism depended. Further, it introduced into descriptions of human embodiment a temporal standard of unprecedented precision, well below the threshold of unaided human perception. By the time of Bergson’s writing, shocks (ébranlement) are fully acknowledged to be themselves divisible, each composed of highfrequency vibrations.
19 he senses of touch, sight, and hearing are tethered to the temporal present in a way that memory, conception, and imagination are not. Mental acts slide across the mind’s representation of past, present, and future. But we can only touch something in the here and now. It may well be that the associationist analysis of the physiological aspects of conscious life did not mean to suggest a temporal schism between states of feeling and states of cognition. But repeatedly their method of description implies one.
John Wesley records a visit he paid in 1759 to two young women who were experiencing spiritual visions: I talked largely with Ann horn and two others, who had been several times in trances. 95 he attention to the momentary abruptness of these visions is typical of Wesleyan writings, which are the earliest materials I have presented that attend closely to timekeeping. 96 he moment begins to intersect with the minute, such that when Wesley visits the horn sisters to witness the divine possession of “all their senses,“ he measures the erratic movements of the spirit calmly, by the clock.