Sunday 16 November 2003

One night I saw a TV programme about string theory, the next day I read this:

"The fourth dimension is actually the only one that matters. Space is nothing - it is reduced every day by mechanical means of communication - but consider two men seated side by side. They do not live in the same time. There is no possible communication between them. And it is often the tragedy of life to feel oneself only a few centimetres away from beings among whom one lives, yet separated from them by all the infinity of time."

(Marcel Brion, "The Idea of Time in the Work of James Joyce", trans. from the French by Robert Sage, in Samuel Beckett and others, Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber and Faber, 1972; first publ. Paris: Shakespeare and Co., 1929))