OPENING SALVO // A Time Jubilee

A Time Jubilee


Can we upend the alienation of modernity by declaring ‘temporal insolvency? 

by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

EXCERPT //

What are the virtues we should pay attention to? What parts of our character are in need of shoring up? As we might repair shingles on a roof that’s letting the rain in, what small changes could we make to be a better person? Better citizen? Rather than constantly judging other people in a zero-sum game, most of us would do well to first take account of our own predicament: a solitary figure standing always in a glass house of some manner or the other—we should reserve the tempting, throwable stones in our pockets for growing Narcissus bulbs instead. 

While some other parts of this year felt as though the days whipped by without comment, this winter, I slowed down. I had time to think. To reflect. To just sit and watch the flames in the fireplace and see what arrived. In his paper “Two Versions of the Good Life & Two Forms of Fear,” Hartmut Rosa proposes that we in the modern world suffer from what he calls “temporal insolvency,” which doesn’t naturally engender this kind of deliberate civic solitude. He writes, “We need more time to do our work properly, we need more time to improve our skills and knowledge, to renew hard- and software, we need more time to care for our kids and elderly parents, more time for our friends and relatives, for our house or flat and for our body, and finally, we need more time to come to terms with ourselves, our minds or souls or psyche.” (Psyche, of course, is the Greek goddess of souls—these gods are in our mouths every day). //

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