It may be self-serving of me to pick this story out from a uniformly brilliant collection—my reading habits as a lazy student were both adventitious and incomplete, and being these days in close service to my own efforts, have not improved—so it isn’t often I can truthfully say “Yes, I’m somewhat familiar with this philosopher’s work”.
Bergson sits at his desk and considers time. And time, and time again. And again. Rose laces the story with Bergson’s concept of duration and the fluid, immeasurable nature of what language obliges us to call the moment as we pass through.
And yet, and yet—it is also a story about cold coffee and tired women, about the 20thcentury, about age and arthritis.
It isn’t the first Rose story to strike me as something of a Gymnopedie—a series of variations, a circling, a fugue of not-quite-repetitions. I’m misusing the musical terms, but you will know what I mean. Like walking around a sculpture and never getting bored.
Collected in Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, Melville House, 2024
A Personal Anthology 