Time and the Sublime

A quick thought, and perhaps an obvious one. It occurred to me today that time is usually an important ingredient of anything that is sublime.

I was listening to somebody talking today, somebody who was talking about a very ephemeral matter and saying whatever came into his head. Nothing wrong with that; we all have to do it.

But it got me thinking about words that have been hallowed by time and that contain a great amount of time, in the sense of concentrated human experience.

Take a few lines almost at random from W.B. Yeats:

Civilization is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under a semblance of peace,
By manifold illusion...

This was quite clearly an idea that was germinating in Yeats's mind for a long, long time. In fact, I  believe the greatness of Yeats lies to a great extent in this fact; that nothing he writes ever seems to be written for effect, that it's all an organic development of his thought and life (even where there are contradictions).

But it doesn't have to be great poetry. Even the words "mind the gap" have tremendous poetry in them, because they bring to mind so many train journeys by so many people over so many years.

It's true even more of any favourite quotation. Any speech from Shakespeare, for instance, not only has its own intrinsic brilliance but inevitably carries the aura, the mystique, of having been repeated through so many generations.

I can't stand in a church or look at a football field (or indeed a railway platform) without thinking of all the human experience that it represents. I once tried to put it into a verse called "Where Life Has Been" (skip if you want):

On a battered Monopoly board;
On a dog-eared deck of cards;
In football boots that have scored
Four thousand goals; on yards
Where generations have played and passed, like changing guards.

In a chipped Coronation mug
In a letter-filled biscuit tin;
In the teddy you used to hug
And the bed that you slept in
When life was a drama waiting to begin.

In the pounded, muddy path
That the cows come home along;
In a battle’s aftermath
Of ruin, and tale, and song;
In an empty dancehall dreaming of its scattered throng.

In an old, old story spoken
By a low fire’s dying light—
Of promises made and broken
Or old wrongs put to right;
That hushes the room, while the wind howls on a winter’s night.

I'm quite proud of that last line. I also love the phrase, "till the cows come home".

Other, better poets have captured the sensation much more masterfully, like Philip Larkin in "Church Going".

Of course, sometimes the momentary and ephemeral is sublime in itself. For instance, the words that Howard Carter spoke when he first saw into Tutankhamen's tomb (through a chink in the wall), and someone asked him if he could see anything: "Yes, wonderful things". And there's a sublimity in the very sight of a news-stand on a city street (in my view).

But in general, I think "concentrated time" is a crucial ingredient of the sublime.