Tag Archives: Space

3 AM

Posted on by
1

This seems like an appropriate time to write this week’s blog post on time/space and history– I guess I fell asleep at a weirdly early hour and ended up waking up at 3 AM. It feels kind of wrong to be hanging around, doing things, having coherent thoughts at 3 in the morning without the lingering guilt from staying up until 3 intentionally or the utter dread of waking up at 3 to catch a flight or something. I’m up right now, and I am not tired, and I will not be tired tomorrow, and soon I will tire and sleep again but there will still have been this odd little bubble of awake at this usually very asleep time. The understanding of 3 AM is a human name for an event during which one should be in bed and dreaming. I play along with that normally because it helps me function in society, but there is nothing inherently bed-y or dreaming-y about 3 in the morning so of course it is just as weird for me to wake up at 9 AM as 3 AM. The perception of higher weirdness is a human construction.

History was on my mind as well this week as I finished reading a biography of Jack Kerouac. He’s an interesting man because he very violently became a product of his surroundings. All people are such products, but I find myself feeling that there is more to Jack’s subjectivity. And, as this particularly biography addressed a few times, there are differences in the “factual” history of his life. He lived from the twenties to the sixties, and he wrote slews of journals documenting almost every day of his life, but still we cannot be sure what exactly happened. It seems miraculous, then, that we could ever trust world history to be unaltered truth when such a perfect candidate for accurate remembering has proven to be so mystifying. It brings me back to my favourite notion of the week– that just as we do not, cannot, fully experience and understand the present, we cannot, and do not, fully experience and understand the past.

Perceptions on Space and Time

Posted on by
2

I think it’s interesting to see the difference in how people measure and objectively view time and space in comparison to how people feel and perceive them. The Theory Toolbox explained using several examples that although within society we have numerical measurements for time and space, whether it is seconds or days and different lengths of distance, how time and space is experienced often depends on the individual. In regards to the idiosyncrasies of personal experiences, many people can relate to the idea of time moving ridiculously slow during one activity but flying by in the next just depending on one’s attitude or perspective. For instance, a student who has done all the reading and understands the chapter on Space/Time for this class may have felt the discussion time move quickly because they were fully engaged. However, the exact opposite could be said for the student who didn’t read the material and had absolutely no desire to even be in a classroom, let alone talk about The Theory Toolbox. What appears to be a set one hour and fifteen minute class can actually feel completely different depending on a student’s attitude and perspective.

In the same way, Nealon and Giroux propose that space can also be dependent on the individual instead of just basic dimensions and measurements of distance. Take, for instance, the idea of the city as a space. In regards to a class system, some would view the city through its positive and “high-culture” characteristics such as fine dining and cultural works like art and the ballet. However, the same city can be seen as dangerous and run-down due to high poverty, crime, and poor infrastructure in lower-class neighborhoods. Space relative to an individual’s perspective is interesting because people often view space as a static backdrop for the events of our lives, yet it constantly changes due to how we perceive it.