Whoever seeks to form an impression of historical time in everyday life may notice the wrinkles of an old man or the scars in which a former fate is preserved. The conjunction of ruins and rebuilt sites can be recalled, noting the obvious shift in style that lends architectural outlines their deep temporal dimension; or one might contemplate the coexistence, connectedness, and hierarchy of variously modernized forms of transport, through which, from sleigh to airplane, entire eras meet. Above all, an individual can think of the successive generations in family or in working life, where different spaces of experience overlap and perspective of the future intersect, inclusive of all the conflict with which they are invested. Even such preliminary observations make clear that the generality of a measurable time based on Nature– even if it possesses its own history– cannot be transformed unmediated into a historical concept of time.
Reinhart Koselleck
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical time
(1979)
Henri de Braekeleer (1840-1888)
De man in de stoel (1876
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