TIME: A PHILOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE by Prof. Hans Heinrich, B.A., M.A., A.B.D., Ph.D., M.D., LL.D., D.C., D.Sc. Fellow of the Association for the Ridicule of the Scientific Establishment Vice-President of the Stephen Duck Society Member of the Debt-Ridden American Middle Class Former Petty Official, German Customs Service Acting Assistant Adjunct Instructor, Ficker University Editor's Introduction The Stephen Duck Society is pleased to reprint and distribute the highly acclaimed views of Prof. Heinrich on time from the philological perspective. It is indeed an honor to be privy to the myth-shattering insights he has brought to bear on this widely misunderstood subject, and we trust that all readers -- whether members of the Society or not, as the case inevitably will be -- will share with me in thanking him for allowing his talk to be disseminated in these pages to a much wider and certainly more discriminating audience, both learned and lay alike, than he could reach in the "more legitimate" scholarly journals which he has often so rightly eschewed on grounds of their fecklessness. The talk reprinted here was originally prepared for and, in Prof. Heinrich's eminently imitable way, delivered in a lecture course entitled "The Concept of Time" at La Roche College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on March 5, 1979. Prof. Heinrich had been, he thought, invited to give this presentation by his friend and colleague Dr. Harold Hower, Chairman of the Humanities Department. Among the more dramatic reactions to Prof. Heinrich's lecture was a concussive skull fracture suffered a few minutes after he began speaking by a student who fell from his chair in a state of heavy narcolepsy. A less dramatic reaction was an action by the dean of the college calling for the immediate dismissal of Dr. Hower on grounds of overfeckfulness. Such, however, are the risks of boldly eviscerating time-honored platitudes and "scientific" half-truths as Prof. Heinrich has done in his speech. Dr. Hower's Introduction of Prof. Heinrich Prof. Hans Heinrich is a distinguished scholar from the University of Tübingen who is now serving as Visiting Professor at Case Western Reverse University in Cleveland, Ohio. His ruthless attacks on the shibboleths and received ideas that mislead both the idiot and the savant have sparked debate not only in his native Germany but also throughout the -- as he refers to it -- so-called civilized world. His brilliant research career has brought him a truly fustian range of knowledge -- sciences, arts, humanities, and even popular culture have all been subjects of his extensive, though not yet widely known, studies. Unlike many other thinkers and critics of his time, he has steadfastly and successfully fought off attempts to label him as a narrowly parochial "specialist," though indeed the depth of his learning would otherwise qualify him for such an appellation if he chose to accept it. Instead, like his favorite hero from both literature and folklore -- the great Faust himself -- Prof. Heinrich has taken all human knowledge into his broad survey, leaving no popular idiocy unassailed and no scholarly assumption unchallenged. Because his academic distinctions are so rich and diverse, even to highlight them would steal valuable time away from his presentation this evening. Therefore, I wish to introduce him as quickly as possible so that we can hear what he has to tell us about "Time: A Philological Perspective." Okay, Hans, it's all yours. Prof. Heinrich's Lecture -- Completely Unexpurgated in All Senses of That Word A few weeks ago, when my friend and colleague Dr. Hower first approached me in the privacy of my home about speaking to you on the subject of time, I recoiled from him in skepticism about the value any such address might have for students who are swept up in the heady and rarefied abstractions of this metaphysical speculation. However, some of that skepticism was later eased a little when I discovered that I had mistakenly understood Dr. Hower to be requesting a talk on time from the perspective of a zoologist rather than a philologist. Although I spent a great deal of time and energy preparing my remarks on this zoological approach before learning of my error, I did not feel angry toward Dr. Hower for misleading me. On the contrary, I in a sense thanked him, for I was quite pleased to be forced to renew my interests in zoology, which had lain dormant for over 25 years since I was a young university student in München... or Munich to you. And in renewing these interests, I also enjoyed the happy experience of seeing new connections among zoology, philology, and time which I trust would not have been vouchsafed to me otherwise. No doubt, there is a lesson in all this -- perhaps not unlike that which is brought home so forcefully in the story about how the vulcanization process in the rubber industry was discovered quite by accident in an obscure home laboratory near Akron, Ohio in the early days of this century. Such is the delightful and charming serendipity one can sometimes encounter through simple misunderstanding! At any rate, it was only a short while ago that I set aside the remarks I was preparing on time from the zoological perspective and turned to those I am about to present this evening on the philological ramifications of the subject. Dr. Hower has told me only a little about other discussions of time you have already heard in the course of these lectures, so I will not try to avoid the inevitable repetitions of earlier speakers' ideas of which I am bound to be guilty at this time. Instead, let us plunge forthwith and with further ado into a consideration of time from the philological perspective. At the outset, I am reminded of an old story which has tickled generations of Germans since it was, according to reliable historians, first introduced into the culture over seven centuries ago. It goes like this. An old farmer is faced with the terrible burden of selling his favorite cow because of hard times. He tries to find comfort from his wife, but she is a shrewish, cantankerous woman who hasn't the slightest understanding of his feelings for the animal. "Klaus," she says to him, "stop carrying on like this and get rid of the damned thing. I'm tired of seeing it befoul my living room." (I should perhaps mention here that even today in German rural life, it is not uncommon for a farmer's family to share its humble dwelling with its livestock ....) Klaus was heartsick. He dragged himself across the room and slowly took down a rope from a peg. He walked over to the cow, who was -- as one might with little effort imagine -- oblivious to its fate. it stood there, chewing its... uh..."cud," I believe you call it in English ... and looking at the farmer with an expression that could fail to move only such a mean and heartless person as the wife. "Liebling," the farmer whispered to the cow, "it's time for your milking." The cow mooed happily, and the farmer led her away on the rope, leaving behind his stern-looking wife who glared after the two, her husky arms folded across her more than ample chest. Once the farmer got outside, he removed the rope and gestured to the cow so as to suggest that it should go ahead without him. The cow did just that, and the farmer never saw her again. And so it is with time and language! It is well known to scholars in the philological disciplines that all language is intimately bound up with, if not completely dependent upon, time. We are indebted to Professor Max Arschgesicht of Heidelberg for his pioneering research into the origins of the relationship between words and clocks. The very word "clock," the professor argues, could not have existed unless there was at some time in antiquity a device or object to which it referred. Ditto, we might say in the vernacular, for the word "time." Why have such a word unless there is some concrete reality out there which begs for a name by which to call it? Why indeed? Once this fact is established, it is not difficult to see that without words, there would be no time whatsoever. Inversely, without time there would be no words. This point is certainly worth belaboring, I believe. To impress upon you the profundity of this discovery, I will call your attention to a ghastly scenario which has developed in my cankered brain over the course of many years. Time and language are such common features of our everyday lives that we take them for granted. But let us imagine for a moment a world from which these two experiences have utterly disappeared. The social effects alone would be devastating. "Passing the time of day" -- an expression and an experience with which almost ail of us are, I believe, familiar -- would be impossible. Words of more than one syllable -- in so far as they depend upon the passage of time for being broadcast into the air or onto the printed page -- would cease to exist. We would be plunged into the hideous darkness of our cave-dwelling ancestors, unable to communicate even our simplest thoughts and rendered virtually immobile for lack of time in which -- as the vulgar expression puts it -- "to get things done." A simple task such as carrying out the garbage, unheard of among those in the Stone Age, would be impossible. The conduct of commerce and industry would likewise be dealt a hard blow, for the dynamic operation of such a basic thing as an assembly line would have to cease altogether. And our cultural life would also suffer enormously. We would no longer have any music, painting, sculpture, literature, or TV sitcoms. I could go on and on painting the grisly picture, but I've noticed that our own time here is passing quickly -- at least for me. Let's take a more positive approach to the relationship between time and words. In so far as time has been regarded since ancient days as a subject of human thought ranging from the sublime to the pedantic, we have a veritable cornucopia of examples to look at here. "Time and the tide wait for no man," for example, is a venerable truism whose deeper meanings can be profitably analyzed by the philologist. How could such a statement be made were it not for the delightful flexibility of our mother tongue? And what of the statement's pith and candor? It puts me in mind of a similar old saw, "Death is the great leveler," a wonderful example of carpentry imagery at work. If we look at such expressions truly objectively and scientifically, we can see with hardly any effort whatsoever that they manifest the intimate connection between time and language. In literature, too, we find a close relationship between time and words. it is surely not unnoteworthy that the famous Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics Course, of which most of you have no doubt heard, has led many of its graduates to dispose of Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea in less time than many of us spend toasting a slice of bread for breakfast. Why is this, you might -- or then again might not -- ask? Obviously, it is not because Hemingway chose such short words for the dialogue and narrative passages in his story. It is instead because these words are what I term "chronologically compatible." That is, they manifest a near-perfect balance between semantic elicitative expression (SEX) and the utterance interval (UI). (Prof. Heinrich goes to blackboard.) Professor Heinrich's Almost Famous Equation We can show this relationship symbolically in the following equation: SEX/UI x Title of Book/Length of Speaker's Tongue = CC (index of chronological compatibility) Applying this analytical tool to Hemingway's book, we find: 11/6 x The Old Man and the Sea/3.5" = 8.3 The highest CC possible is 10, but this -- I hasten to add -- is only a projected figure, since no known works of literature have gone beyond 9.2 thus far in our research. (I might mention in passing that the 9.2 was earned by a rather obscure Latvian epic poem entitled "Ivasornu Elklamiet," which cannot be translated into English without considerably damaging this score. The title might be rendered literally as something like "Emanor the Brave Hunter Searches Everywhere for the Reindeer That He Once Beheld Beside the Stream Running Underneath His Father's Tent.") If you'll pardon the expression, time -- which is our subject here, ja? -- does not permit at present a fuller application of this analysis to other works of literature. Since it will no doubt be of interest to some of you, however, I will mention briefly the CC indices of a few other well-known literary masterpieces. Little Women -- a well-known albeit perhaps rather mediocre masterpiece -- clocks in, so to speak, at 5.1. Moby Dick, a "real killer" as some might call it, is in the pits at 2.4. Shakespeare's plays average 3.7, but some of his sonnets are pushing 4.2. Huck Finn is right around 5.0, mainly because Twain smoked cigars so heavily. And we could go on and on with this list, but perhaps that would not be so good to do at present. (It was at this very moment that one of Prof. Heinrich's listeners fell to the floor and fractured both it and his head.) One real value of the CC index is that it has helped us fill up a few minutes in this speech -- minutes which otherwise might have been given over to meditation or prayer, neither of which is particularly useful, edifying, or pleasant. Beyond the Blue Whore's Diazanon In addition to explorations of the literary aspects of time and the temporal aspects of literature, we may also examine other kinds of verbal expression in such a context. Riddles, for instance, reveal much about the relationship between time and language. A simple example is the famous riddle well-known to children of all ages, as we might say: "Why did the chicken cross the road?" The astute reader or listener will note almost immediately that this riddle contains only one word of more than one syllable. The importance of this fact can be seen with little effort if we measure precisely the length of time required for an average speaker to pronounce the question. In my sample of 3,457 average speakers, I found that over 28% (or 969 speakers) spent 2.368 seconds -- on average-in pronouncing this question. Around 17% (587 speakers) pronounced the question in less than two seconds, with considerable slurring of the last three words. The remaining 55% of the speakers unfortunately refused to cooperate, some of them even going so far as to suggest that unless I left their presence immediately-note the time reference here! -- they would have me arrested and summarily removed from the society of normal human beings. And why did the chicken cross the road? The results of my survey show conclusively that none of the standard answers -- such as the availability of chicken feed, the readiness of a proud rooster, or the impending attack by a man bearing a fierce look of hunger on his visage and a hatchet in his hand -- were in the least adequate explanations of the bird's behavior. On the contrary, the chicken apparently crossed the road because it had nothing better to do at the time. That is the real key point, I believe. (Long pause while full impact of this throbs inside the minds of those listeners still fully able to use their auditory senses.) Another riddle that we might consider in this discussion is the famous riddle of the sphinx. According to the Greek myth of Oedipus -- as you all are, or at any rate should be, aware -- whosoever could solve this riddle would be rewarded with great riches, fame, and power. In the case of Oedipus, of course, the solution led to a great deal more than he -- or his hapless mother -- ever expected. But such a comical turn of events is not uncommon in Greek mythology or, for that matter, in Greek life. The gods were always playing these jokes on lowly mortals and probably getting a lot of kicks out of them. At any rate, the riddle of the sphinx goes something like this -- in the modern translation of my colleague Prof. Halbzunge: "What's brown with blue stripes, walks on six legs, and never pays its bills on time?" Oedipus figured out the answer to this puzzle with the help of a couple of wise men as consultants who lived on a mountain near his home. They told him the correct reply would be -- again in the modern translation -- "a six-legged horse with a crazy paint job that owes a bundle for hay." Oedipus, weak-minded fellow that he was, took these two ancient comedians seriously and went to the sphinx with the answer. When the sphinx heard it, its own severely underdeveloped sense of humor led it to laugh almost uncontrollably and decide that, even though the answer wasn't completely correct, Oedipus should win after all. The rest, as they say, is... myth. What's curious about this riddle in our present analysis of time and language is that Oedipus and the sphinx spoke utterly different tongues which were completely unintelligible to each other. And there weren't any interpreters around to make things easier for them, either. But still the message got across. Why? I submit that it was because both Oedipus and the sphinx lived in the same basic chronolinguistic continuum -- a sort of time zone of human speech, if you will -- and hence could communicate in a manner considerably more sophisticated than that of their less gifted contemporaries, whose time zones were, so to speak, all over the map. A common -- and, I would add, very unfortunate -- misconception about time is that it is constantly disappearing. The premise behind such a view is that time, like certain natural resources, is a finite commodity which can be "used up" or "spent." The old expression well known to businessmen -- "Time is money" -- demonstrates such a belief with startling, if not boring, clarity. Old King Sol Is a Hot Stud But what is missing from this view is that we in effect create time through language As I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, without time we would have no language, and without language we would have no time. This point is closely related to an ancient puzzle in philosophy which is customarily discussed under the heading of "solipsism. " The standard explanation of the origin of this word holds that it comes from a combination of the Latin "solus" -- meaning "alone" -- and "ipse," meaning "self." Hence, we ordinarily think of solipsism as a philosophical theory which claims that all reality emanates from the self, which is the only entity whose existence we can prove without a doubt. But this explanation is hopelessly and utterly inadequate. The real origin of solipsism, I insist, is a combination of the Latin "sol," meaning "sun" -- as in "Old King Sol," for example -- and "ipse," still meaning "self," as in the now-disproven derivation. Of course, the sun, to ancient man, was the primary means of reckoning or measuring what we now think of as "time." Hence, solipsism really is concerned with what we might literally call the "sunself," or the notion that all reality is derived from or ultimately dependent upon one's relationship with time, no matter how fleeting it might be. From this it is but a short step to the view -- an irrefutable one at that, I believe -- which posits human language as the measure of time and, exversely, time as the measure of human language. If I were engaging in a scholastic debate in the 12th century this evening, I might say at this point "Quod est demonstrandum!" But I am not. "Thank You, God, He's Almost Finished" Much as we might like to explore this subject in greater and more exhausting detail, I see rather convincing evidence everywhere in the room that my own time with you tonight is almost at an end. Let me emphasize in closing, however, that this does not mean that I have "used up" this time. Rather, through the words I have broadcast at large into this space before me and into these ears I see appended to the heads of my listeners, I have merely abided for a while. I think you will all have to agree, no matter how distasteful it might be to the thoroughly established and difficult-to-alter chimerical erections in your minds, that the logical persuasiveness of my argument is undeniable, if not downright unbearable. I thank you -- I think. (Prof. Heinrich is helped from podium amidst modest applause, and then swiftly returned to the Happy Haven for Bipolar Performers in time for curfew.) Click HERE to return to Tod the Curmudgeon's Home Page.