One answer to the questions posed at the end of the last chapter is to recognize that Christianity gives new and powerful and transformative impetus to the question, ‘What are you waiting for?’. That is this chapter’s subject.

In my view, there is no artwork that captures the modern sense of time as profoundly as Christian Marklay’s installation, The Clock – first produced in 2010, and, since its opening, repeatedly staged in galleries around the world, to amazed reviews. It is, as Zadie Smith declared, ‘sublime’. The Clock is made up of around 12,000 short film and television clips that run on a 24-hour loop. In every single clip, you can see a watch or clock which shows the exact time at which you are watching The Clock. The synchronization is both funny and uncanny. If you start watching at 2.10, each of the short extracts contains a timepiece showing 2.10 – often several clips for the same minute. At 2.11, it is all 2.11 – and so on for twenty-four hours. At 6.00, a string of hatted men suggests a cocktail; tea is taken repeatedly between 4.00 and 4.30, tea-time; high noon looms and awaits its gunshots. The joy or frustration of interruption is replayed again and again with an extraordinary fascination.

To a reader familiar with the Hebrew text, both the action of the raven and the interpretation are challenging. The Hebrew text reads va’yetze yatzov vashov, which is standardly translated ‘he went to and fro’ until the waters receded. The first bird, that is, can find no place to land but travels around and around. This leads to some delightful and bizarre midrashim. In bSandhedrin 108b, a conversation is imagined between the raven and Noah in which the raven rejects the task offered with a knock-down argument. He must be hated by God and by Noah, the raven argues, to have been selected for the mission, because, since they are unclean animals, there are only two ravens in the ark. If he died from heat or cold, therefore, the species of ravens would be wiped out. He adds that he suspects Noah of wanting to get rid of him so that he can have sex with the raven’s wife! (Noah retorts angrily that since he has observed the prohibition of sex on the ark with his own wife he is scarcely likely to have sex with a raven.) Hence, however, the fearful raven will only fly round and round the ark. Midrash Rabbah Bereshit imagines a different conversation – the idea of a conversation comes from an etymological play on the Hebrew verbs. Noah asserts blithely that the raven can be sent because as an unclean animal he is no good for food or for a sacrifice, only to be reminded by God that ravens would feed Elijah in the desert (Kings 1.17.6) – a paradigmatic demonstration of how the narrative of the Talmud is informed by God’s omniscient (always already) time.

To stand in Rome before the Pantheon and stare up at the huge bronze letters of the domineering inscription M. AGRIPPA L F COS TER FECIT is to recognize the memorializing power of the ancient epigraphic habit – and the degree to which the ancient city was full of sites that made the past physically, visibly present. The Parthenon parades its anonymity, proud in its generalization of the democratic ideal: the Pantheon broadcasts its maker’s name. Even or especially here, however, the act of making memory visible turns out to be more complicated than it might at first seem. The temple itself, originally built by Agrippa, had been burnt down twice, and the second rebuilding was completed by Domitian, an emperor so despised by those who remembered him that his statues were said to bleed and scream (it will be remembered) when beaten in violent damnatio. There is no record of his name on the Pantheon. This facade was rebuilt by Hadrian, who nonetheless has also not left his name anywhere on the building. This may seem an act of surprising restraint, but later history (HA Hadrian 20.3) records that Hadrian did not care to have his name proclaimed on buildings that he established or restored (though he was happy for cities to be named after him).

We ended with first words. Let us start there again. And with a startling beginning.

With “the failure of the Irish people in recent times” on his mind, Douglas Hyde, an Irish translator and later the first president of the fledgling Gaelic League, took the stage at the Leinster Lecture Hall in Dublin late in the autumn of 1892.1 Having been well publicized weeks before in The Freeman’s Journal and in United Ireland, Hyde entitled the address he planned to make before the newly formed National Literary Society, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland.” In anticipation, Hyde had spent days revising the lecture, believing he could illustrate Ireland’s present cultural crisis, namely why it was that a “nation which was once, as every one admits, one of the most classically learned and cultured nations in Europe, is now one of the least so.”2 As Hyde saw it, Irish civilization had declined to such an extent that “one of the most reading and literary peoples has become one of the least studious and most un-literary,” and on that account, the aesthetic sensibilities of the country at large had been degraded, “the present art products of one of the quickest, most sensitive, and most artistic races on earth” having become “only distinguished for their hideousness.

It has been a strange time in which to write about time. This book was written during a year marked and scarred across the world by the Coronavirus, Covid-19. It would be nice to imagine that the comments I am about to make will quickly be out of date, but at the time of writing not only is there no immediate sign of any lessening of the pandemic, but also the glib slogans of public discourse ‘build back better’, ‘the new normal’, seem peculiarly hollow. It seems unlikely that this time of pandemic will be forgotten in the near future, or its impact unfelt.

Let us return to eternity, which in truth we have not ever fully left since the opening chapter.

For Gregory of Nazianzus, then, Christmas Day is to be experienced as a celebration of the history of the universe and as a living recognition of the transformative epiphany of Jesus Christ, an epiphany that changes how time is lived and perceived by the Christian faithful. Gregory wants to redefine how time is counted, recounted, experienced. Ambrose of Milan at around the same time, over in the West, is rather more modest in his vision. At least at first sight. His hymns are designedly simple and easily memorable in form, though, like William Blake’s lyrics, they are far from simple in their linguistic depth and significance – and they proved extraordinarily influential in the invention of Christian time as well as of the Christian hymnic tradition. These hymns are to be sung by a congregation, and there are reports not just of people singing lustily and of the hymns spreading across Italy, but also of annoyance by Ambrose’s opponents at their success in inculcating particular doctrinal views in the singers. Hymns, that is, are to work not by a preacher telling his audience what to think but by a congregation’s absorption of ideas through repeated performance, by the pleasure of singing.

“For the last few days I have been longing for the quiet of the boat,” declared W. B. Yeats.1 As Yeats boarded the RMS Lusitania, bound for New York on January 31, 1914, he welcomed the journey. The previous month had seen him ridiculed in the English press. George Moore (1852–1933), the novelist and his sometime adversary, had published an excerpt from his memoir, Hail and Farewell, where he skewered Yeats, recalling a tantrum the poet had thrown in 1904. Speaking for Hugh Lane (1875–1915) and his exhibition of Impressionist paintings, Yeats had appeared “with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat.”