Augenblicke auf der Museuminsel

Some years ago I wrote an essay for a presentation on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Augenblicke in Griechenland, which is a travelogue of the author’s visit to the Parthenon and the museum next to it. I was and am interested in his use of the word Augenblick, because for him, the idea represents a moment of pure clarity, or immediate experience, unfiltered by explanation, or language or symbol, but is a moment of pure presence. The word Augenblick itself is a bit elusive. In common usage, it means “moment,” or a short period of time. We might want to translate it as “in the blink of an eye.” but Blick means to see, or sight, or even better, the gaze, so that Augenblick is somehow the moment of the eye’s gaze–capturing an instant and holding almost as it were in a timeless eternity–but this is perhaps too melodramatic.
For Hofmannsthal, the moment can be overpowering. They are difficult to capture, impossible to hold, and unexpected when they happen. He has such an experience on the Acropolis as he encounters three Korai. Under their gaze he sees time and timelessness as a dizzying swirl that combines the eternal and the temporary all in the same object. The statues come to represent a world lost forever, even if preserved in the stone artifact.
I have always been captivated by his description, ever since I discovered it. His essay becomes an exercise in language–but not one of words, but of a language of stone. It is something more primal than the words we try to use, and I always had the feeling that even his descriptions never came close to his experience. I have not thought about his work in a few years now.
This week in the New Museum (new because it is only 150 years old) I had an experience that reminded me of Hofmannsthal’s Augenblick, and I think I came a step closer to understanding what he meant. There is in the museum a seated figure, carved from a reddish-brown stone. She dates to the 12. Egyptian dynasty, or around 1850 b.c. That makes her nearly 4000 years old. She sits with crossed arms and bare feet sticking out of a full length robe. In her hand she holds a cloth offering. Her gaze is straight ahead, eyes up, with a look of unspeakable calm on her face. The curators have presented her with dramatic lighting from above, highlighting facial features that are at once strong and yet delicate, almost vulnerable. Overall I see the tension between these two extremes of strength and vulnerability in the statue. The form is one that is repeated over the ages in countless works, both long before this one, and long afterward.
But when I saw it, I was overcome very nearly the same way as Hofmannsthal was. There are so many layers here. When you look at it, at her, it is both a woman and a statue. She confronts you, draws you in to her long-vanished world. I see the faith of the one who commissioned the work and presented it as an offering. Then I see the hopeful, resolute vulnerability of the figure herself, upright and resolved on the hard blank stone block. But here also is the hand of the sculptor, who formed her out of a formless block, and I think of the time that has passed since then and the perfect surface, almost unweathered by time, and I "see" all these people, and I am transported back into their world for just a moment and we connect–
But then words fail, just as it is impossible to recover that time in a single statue. I can’t explain what it was like. I tried to show my students that were there with me in the museum, but they just nodded their heads politely and let me professorize into the wind. I think some of them sort of get it, but then they just wander off.
Much later, when I finally flee the museum, overwhelmed by the impossibility of absorbing so much history in a single morning, I discover that my students have long since left. True, they had class they had to get to, and thus an excuse that I did not share, but I would not have noticed the time either way and would not have made it out in time. What are a few hours in the last 4000 years?

Space is really big

Yesterday I passed 11,000 miles on my bicycle since I began keeping track in September of 2002.

I awoke this morning to the news that science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday at his home in Sri Lanka.

These two events are related.

That isn't to say I killed Clarke with my bike or anything like that, but his death this morning got me to thinking about the things I am trying to say in this blog entry. Clarke, of course, is the author of 2001: a Space Odyssey, the Rama series, and many other science fiction novels. Many of you may know that I am a huge space junkie. In my spare time and in my wasted time I like to visit space-related sites such as this one, or check up on the mars rovers here, or see cool space pics here. I am fascinated by space and the possibility of space travel--not in the Star Trek or Star Wars hyperspace sort of way--but in real, pragmatic ways of getting off this rock. I really hope that I live to see astronauts set foot on Mars. This was they kind of stories Arthur C. Clarke told. So I was sad when I heard about Clarke's death. I know he was 90 years old, so his demise is hardly unexpected, but I will miss his style. His books seldom featured complex or compelling characters, but the ideas were fantastic.

One of the things that interests me about space is that it is so big. I have another (dead) sci-fi author to thank for teaching me this: Douglas Adams. He once wrote in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space. " The profoundness of this statement is obscured even as it is emphasized by the humorous tone in which it is presented. Back to the bike.



I love my bike. It looks like this:



and I have had it since the spring of 2004. When I passed 11,000 miles yesterday, I was rather proud of myself. I know that real bikers travel much much further each year, but I have been averaging about 2000 miles each year commuting to and from the university. My son, always the one to keep my head from getting too big, said with a great deal of enthusiasm, "Dad, I can't wait till you hit a million miles."

Now I have to point out that my 11000 miles puts me nearly half way around the world from where I am now (somewhere in the outback of Australia, I believe), but because space is so incredibly big, I might as well be in my own back yard. So, at my average of 2000 miles a year, it will take me 50 more years to reach 100,000 miles, which is the point at which my bicycle odometer turns over. My wife thinks this is a reasonable goal. To reach my son's goal of 1,000,000 miles, I will have to ride 2000 miles a year for the next 500 years. Now, at its closest, Mars is approximately 34 million miles away. Which means that to get to Mars, our closest neighbor (not counting the moon, which is gravitationally tied to us), it will take me another 17,000 years--at the rate I am currently riding. This assumes that Mars will again be at its closest approach with us at that time.

Just to put things into perspective.