Content TIME IS PERSONALITY - The secret life of time.
SHAKESPEARE’S SONNET - Sonnet 130 - The mystery of Shakespeare’s identity
BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE - Fairy tale endings: death by husband
TIME’S PERSONALITY
To me, time is like a emotional women, I made four sculptures to show my idea that what time actually is, and I took photos of them. She is happy, and her happiness would affect people around her. She is kind and reliable, like what people say: “Time heals all wounds.” Time is so mystery so that often confused me. Sometimes I feel time is super long like the Olympic running tracks, or too short to do anything. And the girl is super selfish. She imprisons every single life, even a piece of dust in her hand. I made four sculptures to show my idea that what time actually is, and I took photos of them. — Weiwei Zhou
SELFISH
RELIABLE
MYSTERY
HAPPY
THE SECRET LIFE OF TIME “It may seem slippery and maddeningly abstract, but it’s also deeply intimate, infusing our every word and gesture.” By Alan Burdick
Some nights—more than I like, lately—I wake to the sound of the bedside clock. The room is dark, without detail, and it expands in such a way that it seems as if I’m outdoors, under an empty sky, or underground, in a cavern. I might be falling through space. I might be dreaming. I could be dead. Only the clock moves, its tick steady, unhurried. At these moments I have the most chilling understanding that time moves in only one direction. I’m tempted to look at the clock, but I already know that it’s the same time it always is: 4 a.m., or 4:10 a.m., or once, for a disconcerting stretch of days, 4:27 a.m. Even without looking, I could deduce the time from the ping of the bedroom radiator gathering steam in winter or the infrequency of the cars passing by on the street outside. The psychologist Edwin G. Boring and his wife, Lucy, described an experiment in which they woke people at intervals to see if they knew what time it was; the average estimate was accurate to within fifty minutes, although almost everyone thought it was later than it actually was. “When a man is
HAPPY MYSTERY RELIABLE SELFISH
asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly bodies,” It’s as if in falling asleep I’d fallen into an egg and woken as the yolk, cushioned and aloft on an extended present. It won’t last, I know. In the morning, the hours and minutes will reassert themselves and this seemingly limitless breadth of time will seem unreal and unreachable—the dream of boundless time, dreamed from the confines of an egg carton. But that’s a thought for tomorrow. For now, it’s now, and the tick of the bedside clock is the muffled beat of a heart. “God, creator of all things.” Say it aloud or listen: in Latin, eight syllables, alternating short and long. “Each of these latter lasts twice as long as each of the former,” Augustine wrote. “I have only to pronounce the line to report that this is the case.” Yet how do we manage to make this measurement? The line is composed of syllables that the mind encounters in succession, one by one. How can the listener consider two syllables at once to compare their durations? How can one hold the longer syllable in mind? Its duration can’t be defined until it’s completed, but by then both syllables are gone. “Both have made their sound, and flown away, and passed by, and exist no more,” Augustine wrote, asking, “So what now exists for me to measure?”
“GOD, CREATOR OF ALL THINGS.”
“SOMETHING FIXED AND PERMANENT THERE.”
Here Augustine arrived at an insight so fundamental that it’s taken as a given: time is a property of the mind. When you ask yourself whether one syllable lasts longer than another, you aren’t measuring the syllables themselves (which no longer exist) but something in your memory, “something fixed and permanent there.” The syllables leave an impression that persists in the present. Indeed, Augustine wrote, what we call three tenses are only one. Past, present, and future are all immediate in the mind—our current memory, our current attention, our current expectations. “There are three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things.” Augustine plucked time from the realm of physics and placed it squarely in what we now call psychology. “In you, my mind, I measure time,” he wrote. Words, sounds, and events come and go, but their passage leaves an impression: “Either time is this impression, or what I measure is not time.” But once a new self realizes its continuity it pauses. “I will always be me”—always, how long is that? A self
SELFISH
RELIABLE
MYSTERY
HAPPY
SELFISH
RELIABLE
MYSTERY
Time is like a women. She is happy. She is reliable. She is mystery. She is selfish.
HAPPY
capable of noticing that everything around it expires can’t avoid concluding that it will, too, somehow, sometime. And so, right around the time that Joshua and Leo turned four, the hard questions began: What is “die”? Will you die? When will you die? Will I die? Are people made of meat? When I die, who will blow out my birthday candles—and who will eat my cake?
SELFISH
RELIABLE
MYSTERY
HAPPY
Years ago, long before I had children or was even married, a friend with children said, “The thing about having kids is that after a while you forget what it was like before you had them.” The idea was shocking. Busy enough with my own life, I couldn’t envisage a future self whose comings and goings were circumscribed, apparently happily, by the wants and needs of people half my size. But that’s what happened. As I grew into the role of parent, I sometimes felt as if I were taking apart a ship and using the planks to build a ship for someone else. I was building a ship across time, out of my time.
“I WILL ALWAYS BE ME” —ALWAYS, HOW LONG IS THAT?
Sonnet Shakespeare
Sonnet
CXXX
130
My mistress eyes ar e nothing like th e sun; Coral is far mor e red, than her lips red: If snow b e white, why then h er breasts ar e dun; If hairs b e wires, black wires grow on h er head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, Bu t no such roses see I in h er cheeks; And in som e perfum es is th er e more d elight Than in th e breath that from my mistr ess reeks. I love to hear h er speak, yet well I know That music hath a far mor e pleasing sound: I grant I never saw a godd ess go, My mistr ess, when sh e walks, tr eads on th e ground: And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare, As any she b elied wi th false compare.
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Shakespeare
Sonnet
CXXX
The Mystery of Shakespeare's Identity On Sept. 10, Shakespearian actor Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (a working modern replica of the London theater Will co-owned and acted at), unveiled a “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt.” Created by the California-based Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, an educational charity dedicated to raising awareness of the Shakespeare identity question, the document asks the world of academia to accept that there is “room for reasonable doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare” and to start taking the research into who is really responsible for his works seriously. Along with Jacobi and Rylance, signatories include Charles Champlin, the former L.A. Times arts editor; Michael Delahoyde, an English professor at Washington State University; and Robin Fox, professor of social theory at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Some more famous names, like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Orson Welles, also lent their posthumous support in a list of people who expressed their own doubts about the Bard when they were alive.
Like alien autopsies and the second gunman, the belief that someone other than a glover’s son from Stratford wrote William Shakespeare’s plays is a conspiracy theory that refuses to die. Doubters started questioning the true identity of the writer in the late 19th century. Ever since then, the theory of an alternate author has flirted with the mainstream as some scholars and researchers have tried to get the broader academic community to treat the question as a legitimate debate, instead of the ramblings of crackpots. Now, almost 300 Shakespeare skeptics have made a very public plea to be taken seriously. On Sept. 10, Shakespearian actor Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (a working modern replica of the London theater Will co-owned and acted at), unveiled a “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt.” Created by the California-based Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, an educational charity dedicated to raising awareness of the Shakespeare identity question, the document asks the world of academia to accept that there is “room for reasonable doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare” and to start taking the research into who is really responsible for his works seriously. Along with Jacobi and Rylance, signatories include Charles Champlin, the former L.A. Times arts editor; Michael Delahoyde, an English professor at Washington State University; and Robin Fox, professor of social theory at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Some more famous names, like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Orson Welles, also lent their posthumous support in a list of people who expressed their own doubts about the Bard when they were alive.
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CXXX Sonnet Shakespeare n o t h i n g t h a n
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CXXX Sonnet Shakespeare
Then there’s the apparent disconnect between the life that William Shakespeare lived and the ones he wrote about. Anti-Stratfordians claim that Shakespeare’s plays show a keen grasp of literature, language, court life and foreign travel — not the kinds of things that a small-town actor without a university education would be familiar with. As the Declaration says, “scholars know nothing about how he acquired the breadth and depth of knowledge displayed in the works.” And so doubting scholars look to well-traveled writers and aristocrats — essayist Francis Bacon; poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe; theater patron Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford — as the more likely candidates. But Shakespeare advocates dismiss this as snobbery, saying that even a basic education at the time would have been enough for Will to write his plays. And, if you emphasize — as Stratfordians do — that most of Shakespeare’s plays were adapted from older works, what he lacked in experience he could have made up for in imagination. “The problem is that argument presupposes that plays from the period consisted of this hidden autobiography,” says leading Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate. “That’s a modern image of the writer as someone who puts his own experiences into his plays, a very romantic idea of writing. But it’s just not how plays were written back then.”
M y m i s t r ess e y e s ar e n o t h i n g l i k e
Coral is far more red,
t h an h e r
the sun;
lips red:
I f s n o w b e w h W e i w e i i t e , w h y t h e n h e r b r e a s t s ar e d u n ; If hairs
be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I h a v e s e e n r o s e s d a m as k e d , r e d a n d w h i t e , B u t n o s u c h r o s es s e e I i n h e r c h e e k s ;
A n d i n s o m e p e r f u m es i s t h e r e m o r e d e l i g h t
T h an i n t h e b r e a t h t h at f r o m m y m i s t r es s r e e k s . I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
T h at m u s i c h a t h a f a r m o r e p l e a s i n g s o u n d : I grant I never saw
a g o d d e s s g o ,Â
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t h i n k m y l o v e as r a r e ,
As a n y s h e b e l i e d w i t h f a l s e c o m p a r e .
Bluebeard’s castel
OPERA
BELA BARTOK
Fairy-Tale Endings: Death by Husband -By KRISTIN HOHENADELMARCH 24, 2010
THERE once lived a hideously blue-bearded man who slit the throats of his half-dozen wives, stashing their corpses in the basement of his castle one by one. So goes the legendary folk tale “Bluebeard” (“La Barbe Bleue”), published by Charles Perrault in 1697 to become an enduring European bedtime story. “When I was growing up in the 1950s, it was a fairy tale that was specifically aimed at little girls,” said the French director Catherine Breillat, 61, whose film adaptation of the tale opened in New York on Friday. “I found it very strange that in the end it’s about teaching little girls to love a man who will kill them. Because that is the story that it tells.” In this Prince Charming-free cautionary tale, marriage is not a happy end but a point of departure. As the story goes, Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas), a man with a reputation for misplacing his many wives, entrusts his newest bride (Lola Créton) with a key to a forbidden door and then leaves on a business trip. During his absence curiosity inevitably gets the best of her, and when she unlocks the door, she discovers a macabre collection of her husband’s ex-wives. The key, tainted with mysteriously fresh blood, betrays her disobedience, and Bluebeard condemns her to join his other spouses. But this time the new wife buys a bit of time by requesting a last prayer and is saved by a pair of sword-wielding men.
There are dozens of versions of the Bluebeard tale, including “Fitcher’s Bird” as told by the Brothers Grimm. Perrault’s “Bluebeard” was influenced partly by the real-life story of Gilles de Rais, a 15th-century pedophile and child murderer, and the word bluebeard is now shorthand for “serial killer.” Continue reading the main story The character’s shadowy presence has long haunted works of art, music and literature the world over. He makes an appearance in Stephen King’s novel “The Shining”; Kurt Vonnegut used the story as a partial premise for his “Bluebeard,” a best-selling 1987 novel; Humbert Humbert compares himself to the character in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” The specter of Bluebeard has also inspired operas by Bela Bartok and Jacques Offenbach and turns up in an untitled 1917 sonnet from the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Yet Bluebeard doesn’t have the name recognition of a Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood in the United States, and its dark subject matter makes it an unlikely candidate for the Disney treatment that could catapult it into the mainstream anytime soon. Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor and the author of “Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives” (Princeton University Press), said that teaching fairy tales to her students and research-
Bluebeard’s castel
OPERA
BELA BARTOK
ing the book convinced her that the tale of Bluebeard had fallen into a “cultural black hole”; she encountered few Americans who were able to recite the details of the story, despite its cultural resonance. “I’m always astonished at how few people know this story,” she said in a phone interview, “especially considering how many films and other works it has inspired.” Ms. Tatar noted that Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” owe something of their plots to the spirit of “Bluebeard.” And she devotes a section of her book to a raft of films made in the 1940s, including George Cukor’s “Gaslight” (1944), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” (1946) and Fritz Lang’s “Secret Beyond the Door ...” (1948), that do not overtly reference the tale but nevertheless turn on a wife’s fear of her largely unknown husband and his possible desire for her throat. More recently, Jane Campion featured a Bluebeard pantomime in her 1993 film “The Piano.”
BELA BARTOK OPERA Bluebeard’s castel
Known as the writer-director of cerebral, sexually explicit films like “Romance” (1999), “Fat Girl” (2001) and “Anatomy of Hell” (2004), Ms. Breillat insisted that nudity and sex have no place in her favorite childhood fairy tale. In her film the only glimpse of flesh involves Bluebeard’s corpulent torso. But that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t see sex as one of the story’s primary themes. Perrault’s tale ends with a tacked-on moral about the fleeting pleasures and damning consequences of a woman’s curiosity, but Ms. Breillat favors a Freudian interpretation: the bloody key as a symbolic nod to the loss of the heroine’s virginity. Get recommendations on the best TV shows and films to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.
Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times’s products and services. SEE SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY “That key imposes a certain destiny,” Ms. Breillat said in her home on a cobblestone street in the 20th Arrondissement, sipping tea in her kitchen. “He is obliged to kill her, but he can’t.” Ms. Breillat takes pains to humanize Bluebeard and to show what she believes is real love between him and his young wife; her Bluebeard, for example, treats his virginal 14-yearold bride with paternal affection, allowing her to sleep alone in the one room in the castle whose
BELA BARTOK OPERA Bluebeard’s castel
threshold is literally too narrow for his girth. With his feminizing corpulence he is more gentle giant than monster. “My Bluebeard is very touching,” she said. “He’s like a father to her. But fathers can be very cruel to their daughters. I think fundamentally ‘Bluebeard’ is a metaphor about the tender and cruel relationship between men and women.”
Terrifying stories like “Bluebeard” can function as a sort of exorcism for our fears, Ms. Breillat said, allowing us the luxury of frightening ourselves in the safety of our imaginations to emerge better able cope with the real horrors of living. “The difference is that children are fascinated by fear because they are invincible,” she said. “They know it won’t happen to them. As adults we project ourselves onto those corpses in the basement.” In 2004, two weeks before she was originally scheduled to start shooting “Bluebeard,” Ms. Breillat had a cerebral hemorrhage that paralyzed her left side. Once she had taught herself to speak and walk again, she said, she could not yet face tackling her