Those of you with long memories may recall that I’ve posted a number of times on books from the Cahiers Series (a joint venture between Sylph Editions and the Center for Writers & Translators at the American University of Paris), a collection of brief essays in chapbook form, with photographs or other works of art as visual accompaniment. It’s been a while since the last one I covered, but today sees me taking a look at the thirty-ninth in the series, one that casts its eye back to a rather traumatic period of recent time. Surprisingly, however, it’s less the period itself that the writer is interested in than how we marked it, with reference to other ways people have chosen to divide up the year.
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To begin with, Marina Warner’s Temporale seems as if it’s going to be a fairly standard run-through of personal experiences. The first lines share an early memory:
The child couldn’t tell the time. It was 1953, and she was looking up at the clock hanging on the wall in the vast, shadowy, central rotunda of her new school in Brussels, and couldn’t read the hands.
p.5 (Sylph Editions, 2022)
The first pages describe the writer’s time at a Catholic school in Brussels, before we then move on to a convent school in Ascot back in England, with descriptions of early starts for mass and delayed breakfasts.
The early mention of the clock is a telling one as Warner’s musings are focused on time, and the place it has in our lives. It’s not so much the minutes and hours that she dwells on, though (although there is a bit of that). Temporale has more to do with the year, and how we divide all that time up into manageable chunks, allowing us to move along with our lives without needing to think too long and hard about how.
The elephant in the room here is the recent Coronavirus pandemic, which inspired the writer’s reflections on time, and the ebb and flow of seasonal activities. The essay notes the way in which our enforced retreat from public, communal life laid bare our reliance on this routine, and how our perception of time was altered as a result. Time on a daily basis appeared to slow down, even as the months and years flew by, and what happened pre-pandemic now seems an eternity away…
As is the case with most of these cahiers, Temporale is beautifully written. Elegant and well-structured, its circles around a few topics, always returning to time and how we organise it. Much is made of how religion underpins our calendar:
The cycle of temporale, the sequences of the offices or rituals for the moveable feasts, was braided into the cycle of sanctorale, the feasts kept on certain days, year in year out. The holiest days were picked out in scarlet by medieval scribes in their Books of Hours and liturgical calendars: red-letter days. (p.25)
As noted above, the first part of Temporale describes Warner’s Catholic upbringing, and she admits to a certain fascination with saints’ days (in particular, with those containing a gruesome back-story).
Having drifted away from the Church, Warner nevertheless acknowledges the effective rhythm of its calendar:
Now I see a structure beneath the doctrines, like a watermark: the liturgical year is a very old way of timekeeping, from an era before watches, before digital clocks. It’s a clock set to run for a whole year, like one of those intricate and awe-inspiring orreries that reproduces the interrelated circlings of the solar system. (p.20)
In a way, it’s comforting, fulfilling a very human need for structure, which is very true for the girl back in Ascot, attending the morning masses in the knowledge of what would happen, which saint would be highlighted, and what colour robes the priests would be wearing.
Having distanced herself from all this, she wonders whether there are alternatives to the religious calendar, leading to a nice exploration of other systems. We take a look at the French Revolutionary calendar, with its nature influences, and are introduced to old almanacs, with local events and highlights to look forward to. Unsurprisingly, Warner isn’t quite as keen on more modern attempts to create red-letter days – there’ll be no Black-Friday sales for this writer…
Scattered throughout the pages are images by Greek photographer Dimitris Kleanthis, a series of photos showing the eerie nature of the lockdown days. Most are unpopulated, featuring a deserted street or an empty room, and, individually, they’re fairly unremarkable. However, taken together, accompanying the text, they form a chilling reminder of all those months spent away from the rest of the world (as a resident of Melbourne, I know what I’m talking about here…).
And yet, all cycles come back to their starting point eventually, and everything begins anew. As slow as life was at times in recent years, most people managed to create their own calendars and mark their days in some way or other. A more careful examination of the photos shows that there are signs of life amidst the seeming barrenness, and the final image in Temporale, of two boys balancing on a wall by a pebbly beach, suggests that the circle has been completed. It’s a lovely note to end on, and a nice way to round off a little book that shows there’s more than one way to make it through the year.