“To create one’s own world takes courage.” ~Georgia O’Keeffe

 

Left: Jankel Andler, The Artist (1927). Private Collection

Time’s Odds and Ends

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly: what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943).

Our legacy, both individually and as a culture, can be found in the mundane objects of everyday life: a photograph, trinket or souvenir, or maybe a letter. Recall, for example, the utter joy of a tornado survivor who recovers a wedding album in the rubble of a home where all else is lost. No grand gesture is needed to memorialize our brief presence here on this earth, or in the sweep of history. Memories are not cached in blocks of years or even weeks—but in moments. And objects, most small enough to hold in our hands and freighted with personal meaning serve as vivid reminders, refueling thoughts and emotions tied to those fleeting instants in the continuum of time. In other words: objects often lose their objectivity once embedded in our personal lives. xxxxxx

This point has been driven home recently, with the discovery and opening of two time capsules—both dating from the early 20th century—one in Boston (discovered inside the standing lion adorning downtown Boston’s Old State House, right, from 1901), the other in New York City (entrusted to the New York Historical Society by a group of businessmen in 1914). The contents of each were announced in separate ceremonies to a frenzied crowd of reporters and onlookers in late October—with outcomes in both instances described as “underwhelming.” Newspapers, photographs, business cards and corporate documents, the flotsam and jetsam of life, could hardly be described as earthshattering or revelatory. But these items, alas, along with a book on U.S. foreign relations (Boston), made up the bulk of the contents. This disappointing result raises as many questions about the scope of human imagination, as it does about our ability to shape a narrative in the present tense for the benefit of future generations.

The answer to this quandary may lie in a limitation we all experience: the difficulty in spotting the epochal, as the mundane details and routines in lives actually being lived enfold us.

No one was better at capturing the dense, complex reality of experience in the present tense than James Joyce, whose early modern, avant-garde novels traced the moment-to-moment sensory onslaught constituting our urban lives. In his affirmation of the power of now, Joyce used various literary techniques to capture Dadelus’s experience of simultaneity, along with a compression of memories past, together with future expectations, into a temporarily ‘thickened’ present. If we apply this concept of time fusion—a deeply individual experience—to the contents of our time capsule discoveries, the crush of past occurrences stored in memory, together with the vagaries of future events, means that the confines of a small box can only serve as an affirmative repository for the shallow ‘here-and-now.’

No room for profound thinkers in an exercise like this. The mantle of the present bears down on us like fog, limiting our choices for successful navigation through the detritus of immediate experience, making it nearly impossible to gather a variety of objects, contained in a mere, small box, that would hold true meaning for future, unknown generations. Time capsules were small devices that engaged the imagination—a H.G. Wellsian time-travel scenario that enjoyed traction as a fictional trope back then—as unimaginable in 1910 as it is today.

Thus, the search for a scope of meaning rarely exeeds the boundaries of the immediate, becoming vaguer as it extends beyond self and family, to city, nation and the world. The farther out one travels from the boundaries imposed by our own skin, our search for life’s anchoring value proposition blurs.

The history of how time capsules came into vogue is not a long one. The phenomenon hit its peak in the 1930s, making its mark at the 1939 World’s Fair, leading to a time capsule frenzy. But, there have been time capsules dating back to at least 1876. Coincidentally, that infatuation corresponds with modern civilization’s emerging awareness of the quantifiable nature of time and space—concepts gaining traction in the face of scientific writings and a shift in our experience of time brought about by the pace of urban life.

There emerged at the turn of the century a preoccupation with such previously immutable concepts as the meaning of time and the nature of consciousness. The active debate over Marx’s dialectic materialism and the growing sophistication of weapons of war marked the first of a series of historical high points in our collective paranoia about the power of nations to shape world events. All of this was actively projected forward with catastrophic prognostications referencing the innately destructive nature of mankind and its impact on civilization as we knew it. Take a look at Whitman’s anxiety-ridden “Years of the Modern” (1865) to discover that ‘mutually assured destruction’ was not just a 20th century, Cold War concept.

Einstein challenged the world to examine the very texture and direction of time. The traditional view of uniform public time, settled by the introduction of global time zones in the 1890s, was only one version to be considered. As human consciousness became a focus of Freud’s work, was possible to consider that there are, in fact, a plurality of private times, mitigated by the places and circumstances we find ourselves in.

Right: Congested and polluted cities became a reality at the turn of the century, in Paris. London and here, in Chicago.

City life presented a challenge for newly arriving immigrants and rural travelers, who found the pace of urban life challenging. The rush and crush of humanity was not only unnerving, it could be dangerous—or even fata—for the uninitiated pedestrian. Mutual indifference is an artifact of city living, with emotional insulation from ever-present, but unnamed threats, a coping skill to be honed and coveted. The French cultural icon, Baudelaire, went so far as to complain that newly urbanized Paris had become indifferent to the work of the romantic poet, even abandoning his creations in the gutter for someone else to find and cherish, as he headed for a brothel.

In this climate of indifference such as was emerging in the late 19th century Industrial Era, is it any wonder that the discrete and highly personal experience of time’s fungible nature would result in time capsule projects corresponding with the idiosyncratic rhythms of a small, highly defined social community or individual? In the New York example, one historian said their time capsule, left, created by the Lower Wall Street Business Men’s Association, was a means for the captains of industry to celebrate themselves and solidify their place in history as merchants, philanthropists and descendants of revolutionaries. In Boston, benefactors gathered a Teddy Roosevelt campaign button, a nail from the Old South meeting House, photos of politicians and a document dating to the Revolutionary War, among other things. Self-congratulations in an age of science and reason seemed the mundane order of the day.

For today’s younger generation, like that in New York asked to assemble items for another time capsule to be opened in one hundred years, the task bears remarkable similarities to those of communities past. There is the usual assortment of Starbuck coffee cups, music CDs, newspaper headlines, subway cards, memorabilia from 9/11 and hand-written statements wishing future capsule openers well.

Right: The lead-covered time capsule hidden for over a century ‘in plain sight.” Contents included letters, photos of local politicians, business cards, historical memorabilia and a large book of foreign policy.

In other words, little has changed in our active understanding of the future. Our notion of ‘future’ will remain a loosely-associated version of the present. It is in our nature to desire better for ourselves and frame our sense of the world through our own experiences. Thus, it is from these two perspectives—desire and activity—that the idea of the ‘future’ and our sense of ‘time’ emerge. Buried and sequestered vessels are only capable of containing the superficial elements of our human nature. And while we live in age filled with global catastrophe and crisis, I predict that future time capsule openings, too, will continue to reveal evidence of current generations’ fragile but unwavering optimism and mutual interdependence.

Thanks for reading ARTES.

Best Wishes,

Richard J. Friswell, Managing Editor

How would you fill a time capsule? Make a list and post it to ARTES, in the “Comments’ section, below…

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