TIME IN ART AND SCIENCE
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The Bergsonian concept of time undergoes, in the art and litera–
ture of the twentieth century, a new interpretation-an intensifica–
tion of the emphasis laid upon the flowing together of the different
periods of time and a departure from an all too sharp distinction be–
tween the spatial and temporal elements of experience. The accent
is now on the simultaneity of these elements in consciousness, the
amorphous fluidity and relativity of space and time, that is to say,
the impossibility of exactly differentiating and defining the media
in which the mind moves. In developing his idea of space-time,
Proust anticipates some of these moments, and he belongs thereby, in
spite of his aestheticism and Flaubertian heritage, to the twen–
tieth century. According to his idea, not only do past and present
flow together and form an indivisible unity, not only are the length
and significance of the different phases of personally experienced
time relative to one another, but even time as a whole is entirely
relative to space. Places and points of time in our memory are as in–
timately connected with one another as are the different moments
themselves in which we experience the same feelings and thoughts
and which we are unable to associate with different dates or to locate
at different phases in our spiritual development. The memory of a
place means a certain period of our life and has no real existence
apart from that period. The memory of a period of our life again
can be so closely connected with a definite place, that such a place
often has much more of a temporal character than the mere dates
or the number of days in which the events in question happened. The
similarity of this spatial-temporal relativism to Einstein's theory is
striking, and Proust himself hints at it in a letter. But it rests on the
novelist's rather superficial acquaintance with the doctrine of physi–
cal relativity. Proust's artistic whim of interconnecting periods and
places has nothing of the definition and exactness of Einstein's theory.
But is it not in just this vague, hazy, and inadequate way that the
great scientific ideas usually influence poets, artists, and, with them,
the world? Their chance consists perhaps just in the vagueness and
the uncommitting form in which they are apt to be expressed. Neither
the theory of natural selection, nor historical materialism, nor psycho–
analysis was conveyed to the world in more precise terms.
Most of the forms of modem art, the visual arts as well as the
novel, are under the spell of the idea of the relativity and the amal-
