Brain Food #401
An extra day
Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
How often do you find yourself thinking, “I could really use an extra day”?
Art, literature, science, and psychology often try to explain, or present ways to control or capture the elusive passing of time. Even tech, with a recent rise in apps that are used to remind us of just exactly how much time we are wasting.
In literature, the Modernists were among the first to largely explore the passing of time and how it is influenced by our perception. T.S. Eliot famously described the fluidity of time in Four Quartets: “Time present and time past. Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present.”
James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place over the course of a single day. So does Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, or The Hours by Michael Cunningham (though the latter covers the lives of three different women across three different periods).
Books that take place over the course of a single day are called ‘Circadian novels’. They all capture a day in the life of their characters, memorable enough to form a story that survives the test of time.
2020, being a leap year, is gifting us with an extra day this month. What are you going to do with yours?