the time is here

 

In the Dictionary of Untranslateables – a title that doubles down on the oxymoron – the section on Times, as temps in French, describes, although it doesn’t explain, the remarkable doubleness of the term for both time and weather. The “time and the weather” – when I was a kid in Atlanta, you could call a number and a recorded voice would tell you both the time and the weather.

The time, in English, is connected by the most obscure of routes to weather – in as much as it is connected to the sun, divided into A.M. and P.M. However, most philosophers who have approached time ignore the weather. That the Latin tempestus and the English Tempest have, ticking in them, a term for time is one of those etymological chances, as meaningless, to the philosopher, as  the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.

But this decade is proving that time, human time, and the weather are so connected that one can feel the juncture in one’s blood. We’re in Montpellier right now. We go out, every afternoon, to swim in the Mediterranean on the beach near La Grande Motte. Here, the water is still fairly cool. But the local newspaper reports that the water on the Cote D’azur – the most famous of the French coasts, the one that includes St. Tropez and Cannes – is registering at 27 to 30 degrees Celsius. We make much of the difference between climate and weather, but these bits of weather, deformed by our industrial and post-industrial system, are crying out that the time has come.

The notion that time comes to an end is one way of looking at the set to which time belongs – those things or events that are finite. The finitude of time, however, is hard to imagine – while we can imagine, because we are seeing, the finitude of local climates. The weather of a place goes wrong, then deeply wrong. The weather of the water goes wrong, and the dead phyla pile up on the shore. We can see our time in the sky, as any child on a swing in a swingset knows.

The Oxford English Dictionary blog has a nice piece on the etymological origins of weather. Weather was once more than a word denoting the given atmospheric conditions of a given place – it meant, as well, wind, sky, breeze storm. We don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing this summer. Can we undo what we have done – unjam our windjam? What I see, right now, is that the swimmers at St. Tropez will just take their boats out a little farther from shore. We accommodate.

And we wait for the next summer to be worse.