Feeling Time. Amit S. Yahav
elaborating on the temporalized trajectories of thought it supports. At stake is not only future recall, but also successive strings issued at present: “When a Man has plann’d his Discourse, he finds a great many Thoughts rising out of every Head, that do not offer themselves upon the general Survey of a Subject. His Thoughts are at the same time more intelligible, and better discover their Drift and Meaning, when they are placed in their proper Lights, and follow one another in a regular Series, than when they are thrown together without Order and Connexion” (4:186). The methodical composition invites “a great many Thoughts rising out of every Head”—successions of ideas that “do not offer themselves upon the general Survey of a Subject” and thus count as digressive, but that are “at the same time” reigned in to discover the “Drift and Meaning” of the author, proceeding in the direction of a future projection for the argument at hand.
Thus both the nonmethodical and methodical compositions promote a pleasure to be had by eliciting and shaping the succession of ideas of their readers, but each uses a different pattern that, in turn, supports different emotions. The first—the rambling walk of an essay—is composed as a meandering line and elicits the feeling of pleasing confusion; the second—organized as a set of points of view—is composed more like a spiraling line that loops forward and back as it also proceeds steadily and gives a reassuring feeling of command. In Chapter 4 we’ll see how these different forms of lines are adapted in later discourses of durational aesthetics—the first develops into the haptic beauty of Hogarth’s serpentine lines and Burke’s curved bodies and is then adapted into the ultimately safe pleasures of Ann Radcliffe’s gothic lines, while the second anticipates Radcliffe’s crucial flagging of recollection in her accounts of how a mind achieves pleasing composure. For now it suffices to recognize the extent to which temporality permeates Addison’s understanding of the pleasure of reading. Whether likened to a rambling walk in the woods or to an ocular prospect of a plantation, reading supports the succession of ideas of readers and gives them a sense of duration. They may “every Moment discover something or other that is new,” or they may have “a Drift” that carries “their own meaning” that also anticipates the meaning of the author. But both models of composition, Addison insists, occasion a succession of ideas and as such shape their readers’ experience of duration into variously formed and felt qualitative experiences.
But if I have been arguing that Addison entrusts leisure reading with the task of mediating qualitative time, then on many accounts reading in the eighteenth century has done nothing but recruit leisure for the purposes of a rational culture with its economic priorities and its chronometric consciousness. Middle-class life in eighteenth-century England had come increasingly to lay stress on a differentiation between work and leisure, which, as Patricia Meyer Spacks points out, “implies a principle of differentiating time.”15 J. H. Plumb documents how the print industry and literacy helped to differentiate work from leisure. He argues that the explosion in production and dissemination of print was especially remarkable because reading materials could be picked up almost anywhere and anytime, and because it aided the commercial organization of other industries. But Plumb also argues that the difference between work and leisure was quickly eroded by the expansion of work’s utilitarian morality and chronometric rhythms into practices of leisure. He delineates how leisure activities came to be conceived as an exertion to increase social standing, or what we might call cultural capital. Similarly, Franco Moretti explains that leisure came to be moralized as work, and such an approach privileged recursive and systematic forms of writing that rationalize fictional representations, thus making them analogous to an economized public sphere. And Deidre Lynch concludes that one result of such reconceived utility of leisure is that “literature begins to be reconceptualized as a steadying influence on those who love it.”16 These studies highlight the reliable periodicity of entertainment production and especially of print publication as the most important dimension of the durational experience that leisure activities promote. From the perspective of such periodicity, entertainment looks like a version of clockwork, extending the chronometric logic of usefulness and work into the durational experience of leisure.
Addison, to be sure, endorses the chronometric approach throughout his writings. In Spectator 10 (12 March 1711), he famously addresses “all regulated Families, that set apart an Hour in every Morning for Tea and Bread and Butter; and would earnestly advise them for their Good to order this Paper to be punctually served up, and to be looked upon as a Part of the Tea Equipage” (1:44–45). Sherman persuasively details Addison’s contribution to the fashioning of a chronometric consciousness based on such recurring invocations of the reliable periodicity of journal publication. In these contributions, Sherman explains, Addison promotes “a diurnal paradigm for achieving, recognizing, and inhabiting the fullness of time.”17 But while Addison routinely makes the case for the potential usefulness of reading, he also often insists that both this usefulness and this time rely on a different logic from the economized values of work. In Spectator 287 (29 January 1712), he emphasizes that entertainment responds to needs other than our ambitions in work: “We look out for Pleasures and Amusements; and among a great number of idle People, there will be many whose Pleasures will lie in Reading and Contemplation” (3:21), he writes. And he often considers the pleasure of reading and contemplation as a pause from the demands for action constantly pressing on us in daily life; aesthetic pleasure promotes a special “time or leisure to reflect” (3:569), he argues in Spectator 418 (30 June 1712). Such discussions not only chart real differences between various kinds of ordinary activities but also differentiate among genres of leisure reading by the varying ways form directs the succession of ideas.
Addison makes this point most directly in his notes on time in Spectator 94 (18 June 1711), where he takes up Locke’s primary definition of duration from the Essay, while also suggesting that Locke’s analysis begs for a distinction between quantities and qualities. If, as Michael Ketcham argues and as subsequent scholars have tended to accept, “The Spectator in effect dramatizes Locke’s account of duration,” then this dramatization serves to think through those details of quality whose tension with Locke’s focus on measures relegates to the status of implications rather than propositions.18 Addison begins by defining duration as the succession of ideas and proposing to “carry this Thought further, and consider a Man as, on one Side, shortening his Time by thinking on nothing, or but a few things; so, on the other, as lengthening it, by employing his Thoughts on many Subjects, or by entertaining a quick and constant Succession of Ideas” (1:399). But soon Addison points out the improbability of our cogitations extending our lives, and he shifts the terms of the discussion from measuring the expanse of any given duration to assessing the feelings it generates. He presents an anecdote about a sultan who immerses his head in water for a few seconds and experiences an alternate life in which he achieves as much as rising, falling, marrying, and giving birth to seven sons and daughters. Such “Eastern Fables” (1:401), Addison explains, illustrate a cosmological truth: God’s eternal nature can scramble human time at will, “mak[ing] a single Day, nay a single Moment, appear to any of his Creatures as a thousand Years” (1:401). But to Mr. Spectator and his English readers, contemplating alternate durations yields different conclusions— conclusions more adequate to their own experiences of the empirical world: “The Hours of a wise Man are lengthened by his Ideas, as those of a Fool are by his Passions: The Time of the one is long, because he does not know what to do with it; so is that of the other, because he distinguishes every Moment of it with some useful or amusing Thought; or in other Words, because the one is always wishing it away, and the other always enjoying it” (1:401). Thus the lesson of Spectator 94 is to keep oneself busy with leisure reading such as that offered by Addison’s journal, but not because a reader lives longer than the fool or even because he feels as though he does. Both endure and experience their durations as having a similar expanse, but the wise man enjoys his time while the fool is bored with it.
One purpose of the eastern fable within this number is to contrast a probabilistic chronometric assessment of time—how long actions must take compared with the length of time allotted to them in a narrative—with a qualitative assessment—the feelings a narrative generates. One moment with one’s head under water may feel like a hundred years; this defies a reader’s probabilistic expectations, but it does generate awe-inspiring