The German Clock Museum, the pride of Furtwangen, is a jungle of instruments of every shape and kind – precious, domestic, automatic, musical – all made to measure time. Outstanding, of course, are the cuckoo-clocks of the Black Forest, the father of which is said to have been a craftsman in Bohemia or, according to others, a certain Franz Anton Ketterer, working in about 1730, or else his father, also called Franz. Here we find pendulum clocks, astronomical clocks, orreries and quartz clocks. We cannot help wondering whether time goes by independently of these instruments, which compute it by means of such different movements, or whether it is not merely the aggregate of these measurements and observations.
Standing among these countless pendulums one does not think of the inquiries of Aristotle or of St Augustine, of those metaphysical speculations about time, but of more modest chronological incongruities. A few months ago, for example, posters were put up by the Italian Neo-Fascist Party (M.S.I.) to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Repubblica di Salò. Those pictures of arms raised in the Fascist salute, elongated by the daggers held in those fists, were also an allegory of the elastic measure to which time is liable, whether individual or historical. In 1948, during that famous electoral campaign, the year 1918 – with the end of the First World War and the union of Trieste with Italy – belonged to a past already distant and placated, no longer capable of arousing ferocious passions: the thirty years between 1918 and 1948 had found a safe haven for these events, all passion spent. But the forty years that have passed between the Repubblica di Salò and its recent celebration are a short time, too short to have put passions to rest: the assembly announced on those posters could well have caused disorders, fighting in the streets, casualties.
Events which occurred many years or decades ago we feel to be contemporary, while facts and feelings a month old seem infinitely distant and erased for ever. Time thins out, lengthens, contracts, forms all but tangible clots or dissolves like fog-banks into nothing. It is as if it were composed of a great number of railway-lines, intersecting and diverging, carrying it in various and contrary directions. For some years now 1918 has come closer to us, for the end of the Hapsburg empire, formerly obliterated in the past, has returned into the present as the object of passionate disputes.
Time is not a single train, moving in one direction at a constant speed. Every so often it meets another train coming in the opposite direction, from the past, and for a short while that past is with us, by our side, in our present. Units of time – those known, for example, in history books as the Quaternary period or the Augustan age, or in the chronicles of our own existence as our schooldays or the time when we loved a certain person – are mysterious and difficult to measure. The forty years since the Repubblica di Salò seem short, while the forty-three of the Belle Époque seem like an endless stretch of time. Napoleon’s empire seems vastly longer than that of the Christian Democrat Party in Italy, though the latter has been far more prolonged.
The great historians, such as Braudel, have dwelt above all upon this mysterious aspect of duration, along with the ambiguity of what we term “contemporary”. This word takes on different meanings, as in tales of science-fiction, according to its movements in space. For example, the Emperor Francis Joseph is a contemporary of someone living in Gorizia, who constantly finds traces of his presence in the world around him, while he belongs to a distant epoch for anyone living at Vignale Monferrato. For Hamsun, who was already born at the time of the Battle of Sédan and still alive at the beginning of the Korean War, the two events are in some way encompassed by the same horizon, while for Weininger, who died very young in 1903, they belong respectively to a pre-natal past and an infinitely distant future, to a world which he would have been unable even to conceive of.
As Bloch has written, the non-contemporaneousness which divides the feelings and habits of individuals and of social classes is one of the keys to history and politics. It seems to us impossible that what for us is still an arduous present is for our children already an irrevocable, unknown past. Everyone, looked at in this way, is both victim and culprit in the matter of lack of understanding. Anyone ten or fifteen years younger than I am cannot understand that the Istrian exodus after the Second World War is for me part of the present, just as I cannot really and truly understand that for him the dates 1968, 1977 and 1981 are milestones marking off different and distinct epochs; periods that for me are superimposed in spite of their considerable differences, like the swaying grasses on a plain.
History comes into existence a little later, when it is already past, and the general connections, determined and written down years afterwards in the annals, confer on an event its role and its importance. Speaking of the capitulation of Bulgaria, an event decisive to the outcome of the First World War and therefore to the end of a civilization, Count Károlyi writes that while he was living through it he did not realize its importance, because “at that moment, ‘that moment’ had not yet become ‘that moment’”. The same is true in fiction for Fabrizio del Dongo, concerning the battle of Waterloo: while he is fighting it, it does not exist. In the pure present, the only dimension, however, in which we live, there is no history. At no single instant is there such a thing as the Fascist period or the October Revolution, because in that fraction of a second there is only the mouth swallowing saliva, the movement of a hand, a glance at the window. As Zeno denied the movement of an arrow shot from a bow, because at each single instant it was stationary at some point in space, and a succession of immobile instants cannot constitute motion, so we might say that it is not the succession of these moments-without-history which creates history, but rather the correlations and additions brought to them by the writing of history. Life, said Kierkegaard, can be understood only by looking backwards, even if it has to be lived looking forwards – that is, towards something that does not exist.