Countless yoga-mats will end up behind cabinets as we recall how fed up we got having to stay inside the first time around.įor Bergson, the “speed” of la durée is also connected to human agency, which is always influenced by subjective and specific memories of the past and shaped by anticipation of the future. The reason why we often struggle to get into the same mindset now is that the memory of the first lockdown “flavours,” as Bergson would say, the current one. People who were lucky enough to not have to cope with the negative effects of the pandemic might have felt a sense of “novelty” about the first lockdown: the sales of exercise equipment rose sharply, some started learning Welsh, others began making bread. But our past feelings and memories influence our present experience of time. The arrival of a train at a particular moment of objective time is always the same. It’s not just that that for many la durée slowed down during lockdown and sped up towards the relatively restriction-free summer.įor Bergson, no two moments of la durée can ever be identical. If we shift our focus from “objective time” to la durée, we can put our finger on the feeling of strangeness surrounding time this year. “Objective time” is just irrelevant to the description of the scene: the ants’ durée really matters to the viewer. None of this can be captured if we took a stopwatch and noted the precise positions of the shoes and the content of their conversations. The filmmakers have managed to squeeze two durées of different speeds into one sequence: the boy walks in slow motion, while the ants converse in real time. In the scene, talking happens in normal time while the steps happen in slow motion.

But we can get a glimpse of the difference between them when they come apart. We don’t need to - “objective time” is far more useful.

Living on our own timeīergson observed that we mostly don’t pay attention to la durée. The second, la durée (“duration”), is “lived time,” the time of our inner subjective experience.

The first face of time is “objective time”: the time of watches, calendars, and train timetables. The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who was a bit of a celebrity in his time, came up with an idea that can help us understand why time has felt so strange in the year of the pandemic, la durée.īergson argued that time has two faces. We all know that there are 60 seconds in a minute but 2020 has made us all aware of how we can experience the passage of time a bit differently.

Even though the clocks are ticking as they should be, days stretch out and some months seems to go on forever. Many people feel that their experience of time has been a bit off this year.

Bergson memory