When you take a step back and think about time as a concept, it’s pretty bizarre. Maybe not so much time as the way we categorize it and feel as if we’ve got a hold of it by chopping it up into manageable pieces (days, months, years).
I’ve been thinking a lot since I came across The Assassin’s Cloak, a fantastic anthology of great diary entries categorized by day of the year. On January 5th, for example, Lord Byron wrote about his hangover in 1821, Virginia Woolf recorded a trip to Kingston in 1918, in 1940, Josef Goebbels gloated about the uproar over the Germans’ English radio broadcasts in London and, in 1978, Andy Warhol wondered about Bianca Jagger’s pimples and whether they were caused by depression over Mick.
Less dishy and more surface-skimming is The Children of Days by Eduardo Galeano. Every day highlights an event or person or historical term. May 8th describes the origins of the Tasmanian Devil (which will not endear you to the British Empire) and September 22nd imagines what a car-free day would be like.
Another very different but equally interesting take on time is in Christa Wolf’s One Day a Year. Asked in an interview what she’d done on a specific day, Wolf decided to record what she did on that day (September 27th) every year. For more than fifty years she wrote an entry on that day, and her insights about live in Berlin and international events are fascinating and timeless.
Kate Staples 