8

EPOCHS

There is something else that stirs my emotions and makes me feel a connection to Martin Heidegger.

At a certain point I began to read Michel Foucault (but you know, when you read Foucault, more than anything else you invent what you think he meant to say, because you grasp little or nothing)—anyway, I was reading Foucault and thinking about Theodor Adorno’s “epochs,” the fact that he often speaks of “constellations.”

Heidegger, too, imagines history as flashes. Sudden illuminations. Occurrences. (The noun in Italian is accadimenti, literally things that befall, that come about, that take place. And the Italian verb that captures the meaning with the greatest idiomatic force is darsi, the reflexive form of dare, to give, which signifies “to occur, to come about, to eventuate.”) Within these flashes time is articulated into historical epochs. But in Heidegger the epoch is a suspension of time, an instantaneous fracture.

Time is not continuous. As in Saint Augustine, in a way, time is linked to existence, and to the existence of mankind. And Being illuminates itself in different ways in different epochs, epochs that are discontinuous. Being is nothing other than certain historical horizons lighting up from time to time, with no visible continuity between one epoch and another.

The cornetist with the Vienna Opera watched my face lighting up, and not just because of the bright sunshine. He kept telling me the story of his life and smiling at me with his eyes.