William James’s “Specious Present” and Willa Cather’s Phenomenology of Memory

Abstract

One day is with Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. 2 Peter 3:8 They held funeral on second day, with town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with crayon face of her father musing profoundly above bier and ladies sibilant and macabre; and very old men-some in their brushed Confederate uniforms-on porch and lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as old do, to whom all is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, dividedfrom them by narrow bottle-neck of most recent decade of William Faulkner. A Rose for Emily, Several years ago I was a visiting professor of English and philosophy at United States Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. When I told one of my English department colleagues that my family and I were planning to visit Taos, Santa Fe and Mesa Verde, he suggested that I read Willa Gather's Death Comes for Archbishop and so I did. About same time my brother called and said that if I wanted to say good bye to our father before it was too late I had better come home to Bismarck, North Dakota soon. And so I did. It was a bittersweet visit. My father's condition had progressed to point that his grasp of and were jumbled and he seemed to sleep most of time. For weekend I was home, in our conversations, he sometimes recognized that I was his son, but other times he thought I was either his brother or his father. However, each time I came back into house he knew it was me, but often he so quickly lost track of my comings and goings that it seemed to him that I had made several fresh, new visits that had each involved a trip from Colorado. My younger brother who had called me home found all of this very sad; but somehow to me it was not partly because I had just finished Death Comes for Archbishop.What stood out above all else was last book wherein Bishop Latour lays in study with his eyes closed and, notice Gather's carefully chosen verb, the Bishop was living his life (297, emphasis added).2 At time that section of her wonderful book most impressed me. Later when I reread book in connection with research for essays dealing with Gather's treatment of pragmatic religion and her environmentalism, I found considerable value in many themes of her rich narrative.3 What I find compelling about Gather's description that Latour is living his life-not re-living or remembering it is how perfectly her account dramatizes William James's contention that human's awareness of time requires consciousness of a specious present. The most influential aspect of Sense of Time and Memory chapters of William James's The Principles of Psychology was his contention that our consciousness of the now is not an awareness of an evanescent moment on heels of a vanishing awaiting a future, but that our sense of the present is an elastic and extended saddle of awareness that contains both pulses of and inchoate expectations of future. With regard to elasticity of the present one's consciousness can embrace, as present, a second, minute, hour, day, year or scores of years. In her rich phenomenology of memory Willa Gather perceptively displays, via recollecting consciousness of her characters, how their past lives are and remain vividly alive. In effect, then, Gather can be seen as perceptively utilizing, extending and embellishing James's specious present. She accomplishes this whenever she allows us to be privy to consciousness of her characters as they enjoy continuing to live (instead of re-living again) defining events of their lives. …