Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 361.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2026-03-10 17:29:49+00:00
        From: Sean Yeager <sean.a.yeager@gmail.com>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.360: time and the future

Hi Willard,

Thank you for getting this conversation going! I'm a former physics
professor who is now a literature professor. I have two publications on
time which might be of interest.

The first discusses "time maps," which are data driven visualizations of
time in narrative. These graphs are made by plotting a narrative's fabula
(the order of events within the narrative) against its syuzhet (the order
in which these are presented to readers). This paper introduces the
foundational theories and methods, though I've started presenting
extensions of this work: https://culturalanalytics.org/article/id/802/

The second discusses "*kakokairos,*" a tongue-in-cheek term I use to
describe neurodivergent experiences of time. I outline this theory by close
reading *Slaughterhouse 5* by Kurt Vonnegut and *Story of Your Life* by Ted
Chiang. Both stories juxtapose an alien species, which experiences time
simultaneously, with normative humans, who are described as experiencing
time linearly. I focus on the protagonists of each text, who occupy a
hybrid temporality, using this to understand ND experiences and to imagine
new futures:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-
abstract/46/1/127/396857/Kakokairos-A-Not-Altogether-Unserious-Theory-
of?redirectedFrom=PDF

The latter paper is in a special issue of *Poetics Today* that I co-edited
which discusses time loops. The other papers in this might also be of
interest: https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/issue/46/1

All best,
Sean

On Tue, Mar 10, 2026 at 5:23 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:

>
>               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 360.
>         Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                       Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         Date: 2026-03-10 08:58:42+00:00
>         From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
>         Subject: time?
>
> Apologies for the following lengthy note. Experience has shown,
> however, that venturing them here is often not in vain. So here goes.
>
> Stephen Hawking's book, A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion. The Essential
> Scientific Works of Albert Einstein (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2009),
> takes its title--without reference--from Einstein's concluding sentence
> in a letter of condolence to the son and wife of his close friend
> Michele Besso: "Für uns gläubige Physiker hat die Scheidung zwischen
> Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft nur die Bedeutung einer wenn auch
> hartnäckigen Illusion." (For us, as devout physicists, the distinction
> between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent
> illusion.)*
>
> In his Foreword to Lincoln Barnett's The Universe and Dr. Einstein
> (1948), Einstein praises the book for avoiding the two great errors in
> popular accounts of abstract scientific subjects (obscuring their core
> in order to be intelligible; alienating the reader by giving an expert
> account). The importance of getting it right, and so presenting the
> subject simply (but not too simply) is, he says, that, "Restricting the
> body of knowledge to a small group deadens the philosophical spirit of a
> people and leads to spiritual poverty." I pick out an example from the
> book, on how we think about time:
>
> > Obviously the astronomer has to think of the universe as a space-
> > time continuum. When he peers through his telescope he looks not
> > only outward in space but backward in time. His sensitive cameras
> > can detect the glimmer of island universes 500 million light years
> > away-faint gleams that began their journey at a period of
> > terrestrial time when the first vertebrates were starting to crawl
> > from warm Paleozoic seas onto the young continents of Earth. His
> > spectroscope tells him, moreover, that these huge outer systems
> > are hurtling into limbo, away from our own galaxy, at incredible
> > velocities ranging up to 35,000 miles a second. Or, more precisely,
> > they were receding from us 500 million years ago. Where they are
> > "now," or whether they even exist "now," no one can say. If we break
> > down our picture of the universe into three subjective dimensions of
> > space and one of local time, then these galaxies have no objective
> > existence save as faint smudges of ancient enfeebled light on a
> > photographic plate. They attain physical reality only in their
> > proper frame of reference, which is the four-dimensional space-time
> > continuum. (p. 66)
>
> I would enormously appreciate any references to other writings on time
> that allow us to think better about the 'future', hence about
> cultural/historical worlds in which predicting this future is taken
> seriously.
>
> Thanks!
> WM
>
> *Albert Einstein and Michele Besso, Correspondance 1903-1955,
> trans. and ed. by Pierre Speziali (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 215 (E. 98),
> p. 538.
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
>    Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk

--
Sean Yeager, Ph.D.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Science and Nature Writing
Kenyon College


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