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How do we have a sense of time as we read a book? Does the author have to tell us how much time has passed? Do we get the full explanation of time in each scifi story as the ship moves into space? How do people on the ship measure time? In some novels there is "spaceship" time mentioned as shifts for workers. Then, the ship "jumps" and time stands still until they reach the end of the "jump." Does that bother us? Do we just take it for granted? I spent a great deal of time being anxious for the commodities trader that was kidnapped by aliens in Alan Dean Foster’s series The Taken considering what he would find when he returned to Earth. Three books worth of angst, in fact.
(Lost and Found, Light Years Beneath My Feet, Candle of Distant Earth).
I just finished reading An Instance of the Fingerpost, a mystery by Iain Pears. A visitor from Venice in 1663 is taken to see King Lear. The narrator of the first part, Marco da Cola, is not impressed and remarks on the fact that the play wanders around in time from fifteen minutes to fifteen years, perhaps, without telling the audience where they are. (paraphrased). I had not thought about that before, but it is true in other plays as well. Is it important to us? Do we make different assumptions than other playgoers about how long it has been between acts or scenes?
In most mystery stories, there is a sense of time running out. The mystery must be solved soon or it will go cold or the murderer will have a chance to kill again. In stories of high suspense we are running against the clock to save something or stop something from happening before it is too late.
In large novels, there is a larger sense of time with several generations of families being introduced to us as in Remembrance Rock by Carl Sandburg who uses one family to show the history of the United States.
Authors can use the seasons to show time passing, or the dialogue where one character tells the other how long he has been gone as in Riddle-Master of Hed by McKillip. McKillip’s descriptions of the seasons are lovely. She shows the farmers and traders and miners at work. It gives us a sense of the time passing. But she also has characters ask how long it has been and the answer helps us focus. Some authors put the time in the heading of a chapter, some use letters.
There are some interesting uses of time. We have mentioned Alan Lightman’s book before, Einstein’s Dreams, in which many different time scenarios are displayed.
For science fiction stories, there must be ways to travel faster than the speed of light. In The Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, there is the tesseract.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The tesseract concept:
In the novel the concept of a tesseract functions more or less like what in modern science-fiction is called a space warp or a wormhole, a portal from one area of space to another which is possible through the bending of the structure of the space-time continuum.
A similar concept occurs in Frank Herbert's Dune novel where it is called the Holzman effect. However, in formal math, a tesseract is a four-dimensional structure similar to a three-dimensional cube, or a two-dimensional square. Such a structure simply presupposes four dimensions of space, but implies nothing about bending the structure of space.
A very neat 3-D animation and other pictures of a mathematical tesseract is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
In Harry Potter, Hermione has a time turner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Hermione receives a Time-Turner from McGonagall in Prisoner of Azkaban, so she could attend more classes than time would normally allow. Hermione is ordered to keep it a secret from everyone, including Harry and Ron, although they do notice the impossibility of her schedule, and several bizarre disappearances and reappearances- the increased schedule does leave her strained towards the end of the year, however. Hermione lets Harry and Ron in on the secret near the end of the book, when she and Harry use the Time-Turner to save Sirius and Buckbeak.
Hermione's Time-Turner resembles an hourglass pendant on a necklace; it is unclear if all of them do. The hourglass pendant is twisted to move through time, and the number of turns on the hourglass corresponds to the number of hours one traveled back in time. The travel ends as the traveler arrives to the point in time of which s/he went back in time (e.g. Hermione and Harry go back three hours; three hours after their arrival in the past, they return to the time period they turned back)
Of course, when I think of time, this song comes through:
Turn! Turn! Turn!
Words-adapted from the bible, book of Ecclesiastes
Music-Pete Seeger
To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose, under heaven
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose, under heaven
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together
To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose, under heaven
A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing
To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose, under heaven
A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time to love, a time to hate
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late
http://www.poemhunter.com/...
Time Quotations:
http://www.quotationspage.com/...
Time is just something that we assign. You know, past, present, it's just all arbitrary. Most Native Americans, they don't think of time as linear; in time, out of time, I never have enough time, circular time, the Stevens wheel. All moments are happening all the time.
Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, Northern Exposure, Hello, I Love You, 1994
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
Rodin (1840 - 1917)
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
Will Rogers (1879 - 1935), New York TImes, Apr. 29, 1930
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg (1878 - 1967)
...............
http://www.quotegarden.com/...
For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work. ~Doug Larson
Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving. ~Martin Amis, Money
Are you aware of time passing in the books that you read? How do the authors do it?
Here is a wonderful article to visit:
Nobel Prize Authors on Time
by Anders Cullhed
28 August 2001
http://nobelprize.org/...
What is Time?
Time is one of the main problems of Western philosophy and literature. Ever since the thinkers of classical Greece tried to understand the swiftness of our seconds, minutes and hours - the impossibility of stepping into the same river twice - the problem of time has haunted our imagination. It is even more than a problem, it is a mystery.
"What is time? It is a secret - lacking in substance and yet almighty." Those are the words of the German Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Thomas Mann, in his great novel The Magic Mountain (1924). Mann was a very modern writer, and yet his definition of time was more or less the same as the one provided by the Roman Church Father Saint Augustine in his famous autobiography, Confessions, more than fifteen hundred years earlier:
What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.
In ancient Greece, people generally conceived of time as a circle. Hesiod, the famous Greek historian from the 8th century B.C., described five ages of mankind, beginning with the golden age in a remote past, where human beings lived in peace with each other and in harmony with nature, down to the miserable contemporary age of iron, characterized by dispute and warfare...
Please read the whole thing. It is fascinating.
I have not read The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, but many friends loved it. Most of us suffered through the movie Groundhog’s Day and I know I learned something from it. Judy Holliday and Dean Martin were in the musical movie Bells Are Ringing many years ago. It is a silly, but fun romp as a lady who runs an answering machine tries to get Dean awake on time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Based on the successful 1956 Broadway production of the same name by Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Jule Styne, it focused on Ella Peterson, who works in the basement office of Susanswerphone, a telephone answering service, where she listens in on others' lives and adds some interest to her own humdrum existence by adopting different identities for her clients, including an out-of-work Method actor, a dentist with musical yearnings, and playwright Jeffrey Moss, who is suffering from writer's block and desperately needs a muse. Adding complications to the plot are the police, who are certain the business is a front for an "escort service," and the owner's shady boyfriend, who unbeknownst to her is using the agency as a bookmaking operation.
Comden and Green won the Writers Guild of America award for Best American Musical. Together with Styne, they shared a Grammy Award nomination for Best Soundtrack Album or Recording of Original Cast from a Motion Picture or TV. Minnelli earned a nomination from the Directors Guild of America. André Previn was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture.
Orwell’s Time Machine and the early movie of it are classics.
What are you thinking about TIME?
Diaries of the week:
Write On! What's all this rejection good for?
by SensibleShoes
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Godel, Escher, Bach series: Little harmonic labyrinth
by plf515
http://www.dailykos.com/...
plf515 has a wonderful book diary on Fridays early and all day.
sarahnity’s list of DKos authors has grown so much that she has her own diary.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
sarahnity says:
It turns out that we have quite a few authors hanging out here who have published books in the real world. A while ago, I started keeping a list of books by Kossacks, former Kossacks and Kossacks-once-removed. I was posting it each week to the diary series What Are You Reading and Bookflurries, but the list has grown long enough, that I've decided to turn it into a diary and post it as a weekly series on Tuesday evenings.
Not all Kossack authors may wish to lose their anonymity, so I am only including the author's UID if he has outed herself here (gender confusion intended). If you'd like to be included on the list, or if you know of an author who is left off, please leave a comment or email me.
(sarahnity@gmail.com)
Algebrateacher and plf are working on a new thing. Algebrateacher says:
The Tutoring Room will always be open and updated weekly.
The Tutoring Room: Your History Sucks; So Does Math
by algebrateacher
http://www.dailykos.com/...