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Chapter 1

Composing Human Time

Locke, Hume, Addison, and Diderot

FINDING IT IMPOSSIBLE to define time through intellectual inquiry, St. Augustine turns to experiencing the reverberations of his own duration in a prayer which he compiles of quotations from various psalms. The move to a self-evident existential duration entails for Augustine not only naming poetry and voice, but also performing both the act of composing and the act of reciting. When duration cannot be defined, it is exemplified in artifacts constituted by compositional activity and sensible experience.¹ In this chapter I trace a similar move in a number of eighteenth-century English discussions of time where the focus on how we come to know duration turns into the suggestion that more than coming to know it, we come to feel it, and that we come to feel it when we listen to music, or read essays and novels, or converse with friends. Music, novels, and conversation—like Augustine’s prayer—solicit the senses as well as the capacity to recognize and form temporal patterns.

A while ago Georges Poulet argued that eighteenth-century empiricists came to understand temporal continuity as a human fabrication arising from the ways in which our minds seek to integrate instances of sensory experience. For the empiricists, Poulet explained, “intensity of sensation ensures the instant; multiplicity of sensation ensures duration.”² Poulet’s compact yet wide-ranging study offers an overview of the emergence of temporal phenomenology from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century. He argues that the break with traditional Christian paradigms launched by the Renaissance introduced duration as a conceptual problem that gave rise to a burgeoning discourse—both philosophical and literary—on the nature of time and its relation to experience. Endurance came to be understood as a conceptual difficulty that calls for human—rather than divine—explanations. In Poulet’s account, seventeenth-century discussions conceived of such human time as a succession of durationless instants whose continuity must be repeatedly asserted from without. For “the seventeenth-century man,” he writes, “duration is a chaplet of instants. The creative activity alone permits passage from one bead to another” (14). By contrast, eighteenth-century discussions began to understand continuity as in and of itself a human fabrication and to examine the possibility of a more organic relation between instants and duration. And while eighteenth-century culture was concerned with positional relations of disjunctive moments, Romantics conceived of each moment as though it encapsulated a linear span; nineteenth-century writers emphasized causal relations among moments; and twentieth-century authors conceived of the moment as a nondeterministic potential. Poulet’s survey remains highly suggestive; it also, however, leaves many specificities unexplored. He usefully emphasizes the importance of intensities and multiplicities in eighteenth-century empiricist discussions of time, but these discussions also persistently raise questions about how such intensities and multiplicities combine to support temporal experience. One pressing question they raise is whether the instant counts as temporal or atemporal. Another is how exactly durational multiplicity relates to and differs from intensification. Yet another regards varying models for integrating multiplicities.

In this chapter I track these questions as they are explored in John Locke’s and David Hume’s philosophies of time and in Joseph Addison’s and Denis Diderot’s comments on discursive compositions and durational experience. In these early sensationist and associationist works, we find various models for understanding the qualities of the instant and the compositional organization of durational multiplicities. Locke famously defines our primary temporal experience through the succession of our ideas, but we will soon see that while his explicit argument focuses on measurement of lengths and presumes the instant to be atemporal, the examples he presents point up sensations and intensities that turn the instant into a part of duration and sway the discussion from estimations of quantities to assessments of qualities. In Hume’s analyses of time, we find a more direct exploration of such durational qualities not only highlighting the durational intensities of the instant, but also qualifying the associative strings that integrate moments into temporal expanses. And in Addison’s and Diderot’s comments on literary aesthetics, we can trace links between durational qualities and an active crafting done by discursive compositions. For Addison and Diderot, durational media such as essays and novels come in numerous genres and forms whose effects variously shape readers’ temporal experiences.

Duration as the Succession of Ideas: Locke and Hume on Quantities and Qualities

For most historians of philosophy, Locke’s contribution to understanding time seems minimal: popularizing Isaac Newton’s distinction between absolute and relative time while focusing on duration’s sensible approximations. Nonetheless, in both popular and academic writing in England throughout the eighteenth century, Locke’s discussion of “Duration and Its Simple Modes” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) was a constant touchstone. As we will soon see, Hume relies on Locke’s initial definitions, and Addison frames his notes on time as a popularization of Locke’s views. And as we will see in subsequent chapters, Edmund Burke founds his durational aesthetics on both direct and indirect polemics with Locke, and Laurence Sterne quotes and misquotes Locke’s Essay in his experiments with narrative duration. These appreciative revisions recognize tensions between Locke’s arguments and his suggestive discussions of examples, pushing the experiential turn that the Essay inaugurates beyond the predominantly quantifying approach that Locke takes. For if in his arguments Locke focuses on the stipulated agreements by which we measure time’s expanse, his examples highlight sensorial and emotional dimensions by which we feel the duration of its instants.

Locke relies on Newton’s distinction between absolute time—a durable medium that flows uniformly and equably—and relative time—our approximate measures of this medium. But he uses a different set of terms. Locke uses the word “duration” to mean real, objective temporality, which flows uniformly, equably, and constantly. He uses the phrases “sense of duration” or “idea of duration” to mean our primary notion of what duration is—our personal experience of temporal flow as it gauges real external duration. Locke uses “time” to mean a common measure of duration—an abstraction that relies on principles of periodicity. And, finally, he uses “time in general” to mean our approximations of objective duration which we can deduce from the idea of periodicity. But most important, Locke’s interest in how we come to know the world through our senses prompts him to focus on personal experiences both individual and collective—what he calls “sense of duration” and “time”—rather than on “duration” as such and “time in general.” In this sense, “Locke’s epistemology of time is the mirror image of time in Newton’s natural philosophy,” as Philip Turetzky puts it, investigating time as a dimension of subjective experience more than as an objective medium.³

Locke’s focus on subjectivity is best illustrated at the outset of chapter xiv in Book II of the Essay, where he launches the discussion with his version of the cogito: I think therefore I endure. “For whilst we are thinking,” he writes, “or whilst we receive successively several Ideas in our Minds, we know that we do exist; and so we call the Existence, or the Continuation of the Existence of our selves, or any thing else, Commensurate to the succession of any Ideas in our Minds, the Duration of our selves” (182).⁴ Locke continues to argue that “we have no perception of Duration, but by considering the train of Ideas, that take their turns in our Understandings. When that succession of Ideas ceases, our perception of Duration ceases with it” (182). He thus disengages any direct relation between time and motion and insists, instead, on the routing of our sense of duration through transformations that we register cognitively. Though time is an absolute external substance, Locke contends, our experience of it relies on the mediation of our psychological capacities, rather than on direct access to external motion.

By equating duration with a perception of thinking and with personal endurance, Locke positions his inquiry squarely in the realm of human time and emphasizes individual consciousness.⁵ And yet by equating personal endurance with the succession of ideas, Locke opens up his inquiry of time to many of the complications that more generally trouble his examination of human psychology. For the “idea” in Locke’s philosophy is a concept both absolutely central and notoriously vexed, as it marks a porous borderline between external realities and internal experience. Arguing against conceptions of human cognition that rely on innateness, Locke insists that all of our ideas rely on our sense perceptions. But he also recognizes that our perceptions are not simply mirror impressions of an external world. Our cognition mediates stimulation such that most of our ideas are very different from the properties of objects. To begin with, Locke distinguishes between primary and secondary qualities of objects and argues that while our ideas of the first resemble objects, our ideas of the second arise from our sensory apparatuses as these reshape and remake the stimulation emanating from objects. As he describes it, “The particular Bulk, Number, Figure, and Motion of the parts of Fire, or Snow, are really in them, whether any ones Senses perceive them or no: and therefore they may be called real Qualities, because they really exist in those Bodies. But Light, Heat, Whiteness, or Coldness, are no more really in them, than Sickness or Pain is in Manna. Take away the Sensation of them; let not the Eyes see Light, or Colours, nor the Ears hear Sounds; let the Palate not Taste, nor the Nose Smell, and all Colours, Tastes, Odors, and Sounds, as they are such particular Ideas, vanish and cease, and are reduced to their Causes, i.e. Bulk, Figure, and Motion of Parts” (137–38). Color, taste, smell, and sound, Locke explains, do not exist without eyes, tongues, noses, and ears to perceive them. Secondly, attention determines which stimulations register in our understanding to produce ideas and which do not: “A sufficient impulse there may be on the Organ; but it not reaching the observation of the Mind, there follows no perception: And though the motion, that uses to produce the Idea of Sound, be made in the Ear, yet no sound is heard. Want of Sensation in this case, is not through any defect in the Organ, or that the Man’s Ears are less affected, than at other times, when he does hear: but that which uses to produce the Idea, though conveyed in by the usual Organ, not being taken notice of in the Understanding, and so imprinting no Idea on the Mind, there follows no Sensation” (144). If we are already absorbed in a thought of one kind, then any amount of stimulation around us that is irrelevant to that thought will go unnoticed. Finally, memory guarantees that we can have ideas of objects in their absence—that we can have ideas even when our senses do not deliver any external stimulation. As Locke explains, “This laying up of our Ideas in the Repository of the Memory, signifies no more but this, that the Mind has a Power, in many cases, to revive Perceptions, which it has once had, with this additional Perception annexed to them” (150). And he concludes: “Memory, in an intellectual Creature, is necessary in the next degree to Perception. It is of so great moment, that where it is wanting, all the rest of our Faculties are in a great measure useless” (153). Memory turns out to be, in Locke’s account, a supplier of ideas no less than external objects, making perceptions of the external world—once it has been perceived—no longer necessary.

Our cognition thus functions as a mediation that variously shapes and makes ideas and, even more important for my purposes here, shapes and makes succession. Attention, for example, crucially determines the speed and content of the succession of our ideas. If our attention is fixed by one idea, this halts succession, which in turn, by Locke’s initial definition, slows down our sense of duration or even brings it to a standstill. While objective duration may flow equably and uniformly, our primary sense of duration cannot be as steady or regular. And if memory supports the generating of ideas, then this suggests that our succession of ideas may not only, or not simply, be moving forward. If our sense of duration is determined by the succession of ideas, then an idea retrieved from memory supports the experience of time passing from one moment to the next by thrusting us back into a moment that has already passed. Thus even as objective time can only flow from past to future, our primary sense of duration cannot be unidirectional. Moreover, Locke’s account of the mediating role of our cognition entails that any enhancement or diminishment of our capacities—an extraordinarily sharp memory or, conversely, memory loss; attention deficit or, conversely, hyperfocus; the use of technological tools such as a microscope or, conversely, sensory disabilities such as blindness—could radically challenge any generalization a philosopher might make about ideas and their succession.⁶ For Locke’s inquiry of time, such complications raise two questions. First, how might shared measures and collective experiences of duration arise from the indeterminate and widely varying conditions that generate the succession of ideas in individual minds? And second, what kind of a sense of endurance might we have when our attention, senses, or memories are disabled or significantly altered?

The first question is especially pressing, for throughout his discussion Locke emphasizes our need for shared public measures of time. The mind, he argues, naturally searches for “some measure of this common Duration, whereby it might judge of its different lengths, and consider the distinct Order, wherein several things exist, without which a great part of our Knowledge would be confused, and a great part of History be rendered very useless. This Consideration of Duration, as set out by certain Periods, and marked by certain Measures or Epochs, is that, I think, which most properly we call Time” (187). But how do we arrive at such “Measures or Epochs”? How might we agree on such standards if our primary sense of duration varies contingently? Just as Locke does not explain how we construct and arrive at consensus about language or money, he also does not offer detailed conjectures on how we construct and arrive at consensus about temporal measures. But he does suggest that there are, after all, ways for us to asses durations we do not experience, and this makes possible agreements about conventional measurement. If we need not consult our widely varying experience in our assessments of time, then consensus about extensities becomes much more readily available.

There are many occasions in which we do not experience duration as it passes, Locke points out, the most common of which is sleep. And so he explains: “Though a Man has no Perception of the length of Duration, which past whilst he slept or thought not: yet having observed the Revolution of Days and Nights, and found the length of their Duration to be in Appearance regular and constant, he can, upon the supposition, that that Revolution has proceeded after the same manner, whilst he was asleep or thought not, as it used to do at other times, he can, I say, imagine and make allowance for the length of Duration, whilst he slept” (183). We may remember that night follows day, follows night again, but in order to recognize “the length of their Duration to be in Appearance regular and constant”—which, of course, contrary to Locke’s assertion, they are not—we must have already abstracted a sense of measure from their occurrence. This abstracted idea of periodicity serves a double function: first to validate the observation that at stake is not simply succession but also, more specifically, equable succession, and second to deduce how long we have slept. Locke readily acknowledges how the abstracted idea of periodicity serves the second function—how we “imagine and make allowance for the length of Duration, whilst he slept.” The first function of our abstracted idea of periodicity—that we “found the length of their [Revolution’s] Duration to be in Appearance regular and constant”—remains only indirectly implied. But once we recognize that we would need an abstract measure to assess the revolutions of day and night as recurring at the same intervals, we must also acknowledge that the move from our “sense of duration” to “time”—that common measure in Locke’s vocabulary—involves the superfluity of our primary sense of duration: in order to measure the length of succession we need a standard independent of our experience of this succession. It thus turns out that counting time relies on abstractions that may or may not validate experiences but that do not arise from these experiences. Measures of time, then, rely on stipulated standards that make an actual primary experience of duration irrelevant.

Throughout Locke’s discussion we find such tension between a reliance on abstractions for measuring time and a lingering commitment to sensation. On the one hand, Locke points out the arbitrariness of our conventions. “Minutes, Hours, Days, and Years,” he reminds us, “are then no more necessary to Time or Duration, than Inches, Feet, Yards, and Miles, marked out in any Matter, are to Extension” (191). On the other hand, he privileges those conventions that seem as though they are verified by direct sensory evidence. Thus, for example, he prefers the temporal estimations of a blind man who can smell, taste, and feel seasonal change over those generated by calendars:

Thus we see that Men born blind, count Time well enough by Years, whose Revolutions yet they cannot distinguish by Motions, that they perceive not: And I ask, whether a blind Man, who distinguished his Years, either by heat of Summer, or cold of Winter; by the Smell of any Flower of the Spring, or taste of any Fruit of the Autumn, would not have a better measure of Time, than the Romans had before the Reformation of their Calendar by Julius Cæsar, or many other People, whose Years, notwithstanding the motion of the Sun, which they pretend to make use of, are very irregular: and it adds no small difficulty to Chronology, that the exact lengths of the Years that several Nations counted by, are hard to be known, they differing very much one from another, and, I think, I may say all of them, from the precise motion of the Sun. (189)

And yet, the heat of air, the blossoming of flowers, and the ripeness of fruit are no less “irregular” than “the motion of the Sun” that underwrites the old Roman calendar, which Locke here criticizes. What drives Locke’s privileging of the blind man’s temporal estimations in this passage is the sheer sensual abundance of his description. That the blind man relies on three senses that connect his estimations of the passage of time to nature’s seasons suggests to Locke that he can “count Time well enough”—even better than those whose estimations of the sun’s motions in their calendars turn out to be faulty. The fewer mediating apparatuses between our perceptions of the external world and our temporal estimations of length, Locke indicates, the more reliable our estimations of time will be.

That Locke prefers notions of time passing that more directly arise from sensation becomes even clearer as he proceeds to discuss the measures afforded by the new technology of pendulum clocks.⁷ He writes:

Though Men have of late made use of a Pendulum, as a more steady and regular Motion, than that of the Sun or (to speak more truly) of the Earth; yet if any one should be asked how he certainly knows, that the two successive swings of a Pendulum are equal, it would be very hard to satisfie himself, that they are infallibly so: since we cannot be sure, that the Cause of that Motion which is unknown to us, shall always operate equally; and we are sure, that the Medium in which the Pendulum moves, is not constantly the same: either of which varying, may alter the Equality of such Periods, and thereby destroy the certainty and exactness of the measure by Motion, as well as any other Periods of other Appearances, the Notion of Duration still remaining clear, though our measures of it cannot any of them be demonstrated to be exact. (190)

It is especially striking that Locke should emphasize the unreliability of a pendulum in ordinary conditions of experience immediately after privileging the blind man’s sensual estimations of time passing. The majority of the passage points out that in most circumstances a pendulum will not deliver to our senses an idea of regular motion. For this reason, Locke concludes, temporal measures that rely on a pendulum cannot “be demonstrated to be exact.” And yet, he continues to insist, “the Notion of Duration still remain[s] clear”—as though our sensual experiences of day and night, heat, and ripening fruit, have already settled everything we might want to know about the passage of time. The tracking of seasonal change mediated only by the personal senses seems to him more reliable than any knowledge mediated by technologies whose workings many of us cannot directly observe or understand. This, Locke indicates, makes measures not only imprecise but also experientially suspicious. What Locke less than fully acknowledges here, but that arises indirectly and yet persistently from his discussion, is that the experiential confidence that we have about duration might be best described as feelings of intensities—of temperature, of fragrance, of sweetness.

I am suggesting that Locke’s privileging of firsthand sensual experience in his discussions of the various ways in which our succession of ideas supports conventions for assessing temporal length indicates a dimension of time that his concern for and vocabulary of counting eludes. If sensual experience lends certainty to our sense of duration where abstract measures cannot, then the certainty it furnishes is one that assesses qualities more than quantities—one that gauges feelings and intensities rather than the counting of expanses. Such qualitative dimensions of our sense of duration become even more apparent when we closely examine Locke’s discussion of durations that our sensory apparatuses are not calibrated to perceive. He points out that a succession of moving objects may happen at speeds that are either too fast or too slow for us to notice. The express purpose of the section is to argue that our primary sense of duration arises from the internal succession of ideas, rather than from our registering of external moving objects. But as Locke presents an example, he turns to redefining the instant in such a way that incorporates it as a part of time even as its extensity cannot be measured.

Here is what Locke has to say about the situation of being shot—his example of succession too fast for us to register cognitively:

Let a Cannon-Bullet pass through a Room, and in its way take with it any Limb, or fleshy Parts of a Man; ’tis as clear as any Demonstration can be, that it must strike successively the two sides of the Room: ’Tis also evident, that it must touch one part of the Flesh first, and another after; and so in Succession: And yet I believe, no Body, who ever felt the pain of such a shot, or heard the blow against the two distant Walls, could perceive any Succession, either in the pain, or sound of so swift a stroke. Such a part of Duration as this, wherein we perceive no Succession, is that which we may call an Instant; and is that which takes up the time of only one Idea in our Minds, without the Succession of another, wherein therefore we perceive no Succession at all. (185)

Locke’s assertion that “no Body, who ever felt the pain of such a shot, or heard the blow against the two distant Walls, could perceive any Succession, either in the pain, or sound of so swift a stroke” serves a crucial double purpose here. On the one hand, Locke argues that without the perception of succession such an instance can only yield an instant—“that which takes up the time of only one Idea in our Minds.” On the other hand, his prose highlights a succession of dramatic events and their strong impact on the body—the “pain” and the “blow”—which cannot but evoke some temporal dimension through which and in which the wounded person experiences his endurance. And it is precisely this drama—the event of being shot, highlighted through discursive succession even as, or precisely because, the represented body cannot gauge this succession—that leads Locke to redefine the instant as “a part of time.” Recall that the opening paragraphs of his discussion of time define our primary sense of duration as succession—as the difference between one idea and another: “We have no perception of Duration, but by considering the train of Ideas, that take their turns in our Understandings. When that succession of Ideas ceases, our perception of Duration ceases with it” (182). By this initial logic, the instant, the single idea, is atemporal. However, by the second definition—the instant in the example of being shot—a single idea is already a temporal element—“that which takes up the time of only one Idea.” In the next chapter Locke reiterates the second definition, the one that conceives of the instant— which here he calls a moment—as a part of duration. “Such a small part in Duration,” he writes, “may be called a Moment, and is the time of one Idea in our Minds” (203). Thus the example of being shot prompts Locke to revise his initial account of our primary sense of duration to include the instant. And this revision suggests, in turn, that we might have an idea of duration that does not pertain to extensity and cannot be measured. Though duration can’t be counted when we are shot or when we hold a single idea in our minds, though we cannot tell time’s length from firsthand sensations on such occasions, we do have some temporal notion—the instant or the moment—crucial to our persisting endurance through such events. And if the quantity or extensity of such moments cannot be assessed, their quality or intensity seems unavoidable. At stake here is an immeasurable moment that cannot be subtracted from endurance. I think therefore I endure—“the Continuation of the Existence of our selves” with which Locke began his chapters on duration—thus turns out to be “Commensurate to the succession of any Ideas in our Minds,” with an emphasis falling on “any” more than on “succession.” Any single idea turns out to be key to our sense of duration insofar as its qualities inescapably graft themselves on our minds and bodies and even as its quantities remain unknown.

Locke’s discussion, then, points up qualitative dimensions of durational experience that his explicit argument cannot account for. These qualitative dimensions arise from irregularities of succession and from intensities of sensations, aspects of “the succession of ideas” whose impact on our sense of duration Locke considers only indirectly. In Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), however, these dimensions take center stage. Far more than Locke, Hume focuses on differentiating between “degrees and force of liveliness,” as Hume puts it throughout the first chapter of the Treatise. Hume distinguishes between impressions and ideas and devotes much attention to the passions, which he takes to deliver impressions of the strongest degree, in contrast to “the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning,” (1), which he calls ideas.”⁸ Hume also examines the logic of association among impressions and ideas much more thoroughly than Locke does. Whereas Locke posits succession as a singular principle requiring little analysis and devotes only one chapter to the association of ideas in which he primarily focuses on the dangers of chance connections, Hume argues that resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect are all principles that universally and naturally encourage our relating one idea or impression to another thus complexly shaping thoughts and feelings (11).⁹ Hume proposes that such associative operations are responsible for both the diachronic movement of our minds—the succession of our ideas and impressions—and the synchronic resonances that reverberate in the mind at a single instant—the complex ideas and passions that yoke together a number of impressions and ideas into coherent notions of substance or mode.¹⁰ Furthermore, he distinguishes between the ways by which ideas connect to one another and the ways by which impressions do, arguing that “ideas are associated by resemblance, contiguity, and causation; and impressions only by resemblance” (283). For Hume, then, our minds are constituted to begin with by a variety of compositional principles, thus yielding varying qualities of association. Together these principles of association form “a kind of Attraction, which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to shew itself in as many and as various forms” (12–13).

Such privileging of sensible, affective, and compositional dimensions informs Hume’s discussion of time in Book I of the Treatise. Hume argues “that time cannot make its appearance to the mind, either alone, or attended with a steady unchangeable object, but is always discover’d by some perceivable succession of changeable objects” (35). But Hume directly recognizes that attention to such succession of perceptions yields notions not only of quantity, but also of quality. Hume defines “the idea of time” (34) as “an abstract idea, which comprehends a still greater variety than that of space, and yet is represented in the fancy by some particular individual idea of a determinate quantity and quality” (35). Qualities of duration arise because, according to Hume, our idea of time is “deriv’d from the succession of our perceptions of every kind, ideas as well as impressions, and impressions of reflection as well as of sensation” (34–35), thus including “internal impressions,” which he specifies as “our passions, emotions, desires and aversions” (33) and which he has earlier excluded from our idea of space. Moreover, Hume emphasizes that each and every one of the impressions and ideas that combine into our sense of time constitutes a substantial experience: “’Tis certain then, that time, as it exists, must be compos’d of indivisible moments” (31) that “must be fill’d with some real object or existence” (39), which he also calls “sensible qualities” (39). He does not count these “indivisible moments” as supporting our sense of time; following Locke’s explicit argument, only succession does this job for Hume. Yet he devotes much of his discussion to the experiential endurance of these units, highlighting their positivity. Hume defines the moment in Book I of the Treatise as, strictly speaking, not a part of time; and yet, he also attributes to it what Gilles Deleuze identifies in Hume’s philosophy as “real existence.” As Deleuze explains it, “real existence” is “neither a mathematical nor a physical point, but rather a sensible one,” and he adds, “a physical point is already extended and divisible; a mathematical point is nothing.” A sensible point is indivisible, and yet it is something.¹¹

Beyond highlighting the moment as a part of endurance by virtue of its “sensible qualities,” Hume argues that our idea of time is not an object in and of itself, “but arises altogether from the manner, in which impressions appear to the mind” (36). A moment “must be fill’d with some real object or existence,” and our idea of time is created by the very principles of composition that string these real objects together. And if these principles of composition are by Locke’s analysis mere “succession,” then Hume’s analysis differentiates variable forms of succession. More specifically, Hume exemplifies succession as the order and rhythm in which musical notes appear, suggesting that even as principles of succession are not objects in and of themselves, they cannot be extricated from the existences through which they are perceived. Thus, Hume explains, “Five notes play’d on a flute give us the impression and idea of time; tho’ time be not a sixth impression, which presents itself to the hearing or any other of the senses…. But here it only takes notice of the manner, in which the different sounds make their appearance” (36–37). Such an explication of the succession that defines time produces it as an aesthetic form—both a logic of composition and an ineluctably experiential apprehension of it.

When Hume discusses measurement, he considers it to be more like an artist’s intuition inextricable from his practice than like a mathematical abstraction. In a long discussion of the unreliable precision of all our measures of size—of bodies and space as much of as of time—Hume comments about the aptness of our intuitive estimations of duration, analogizing these to artists’ intuitions about their media. He writes:

This appears very conspicuously with regard to time; where tho’ ’tis evident we have no exact method of determining the proportions of parts, not even so exact as in extension, yet the various corrections of our measures, and their different degrees of exactness, have given us an obscure and implicit notion of a perfect and entire equality. The case is the same in many other subjects. A musician finding his ear become every day more delicate, and correcting himself by reflection and attention, proceeds with the same act of the mind, even when the subject fails him, and entertains a notion of a compleat tierce or octave, without being able to tell whence he derives his standard. A painter forms the same fiction with regard to colours. A mechanic with regard to motion. To the one light and shade; to the other swift and slow are imagin’d to be capable of an exact comparison and equality beyond the judgments of the senses. (48–49)

Hume argues that we have strong intuitions about temporal quantities that rely on repeated practice, which belie both theoretical understanding and the contingencies of sensory experience. Our estimations of temporal measures, he suggests, are irreducibly practical, arising from doing more than from knowing, from practice more than theory. But if, say, a violinist’s practice is constituted by repeated performances of a number of musical pieces, what counts as an ordinary time-teller’s practice? Hume begins the paragraph indicating that consulting our watches might be the practice at stake: “The various corrections of our measures, and their different degrees of exactness, have given us an obscure and implicit notion of a perfect and entire equality,” he writes. And as Stuart Sherman has documented meticulously, the technology for individual watches and clocks, which was developed in the seventeenth century, became widely available for middle class consumers in the eighteenth century, turning chronometric measuring into a general practice. But if we allow Hume’s analogies the power of illuminating the principle that they compare with, then we might notice that in these Hume does not highlight steady beat or determinate lines or parts—elements of musicians’, painters’, and mechanics’ craftsmanship that more obviously support a numerical estimation of proportion and are thus more obviously analogous to watches and clocks. What Hume is after in invoking a musician’s ear for an octave, a painter’s eye for color, and a mechanic’s sense of motion are discriminations that rely on contrasts rather than on more minutely expressed comparisons but that nonetheless deliver fine-grained assessments. While the sources of these qualities are precise mathematical proportions, the artist gauges them not as such, but rather as the sum of a sensual effect—a particular shade of turquoise rather than blue, or a C-major scale rather than a D-major scale. Thus Hume directs us to think of our temporal assessments more along the lines of estimations of qualities than approximations of chronometry—school time feels different from commute time which feels different from dinner time. Even when Hume discusses temporal measure and extensity, then, he describes these as intuitions comparable to feelings about intensities of sensual effects more than to estimations of length.

Hume returns to questions of time in his examination of the passions in Book II of the Treatise, where he devotes chapters vii and viii of Part III to examining how spatiotemporal position variously shapes our feelings towards objects. If the discussion in Book I stresses that duration has various qualities that arise from varying arrangements of impressions and ideas (whether simultaneous or in succession), then here the varying qualities of experience are determined by the spatial and temporal arrangement of objects in relation to us. Hume argues, for example, that because we can perceive distant space co-extensively with ourselves but the experience of time is necessarily successive, it is harder to think vivaciously of distant times than of distant places. Additionally, because the past flows away from us while the future gets closer to us, it is easier to imagine a future than a past. Such observations may seem surprising for twenty-first-century readers who tend to privilege the ways in which the succession of our ideas repeatedly connects up with memories—whether as compulsive and disturbing trauma, or as sweeter and more deliberate nostalgia. But for Hume—and as we will see in the next chapter, for Richardson and Hutcheson as well—a succession of ideas that aims to project the future seems like an especially valuable ethico-cognitive activity. But in any case, even as we may or may not agree with the content of Hume’s observations about our feelings toward past and future, we should recognize the extent to which he insistently attends to qualities and to the way by which such qualities are generated by compositional determinations. When examining varying strengths of feeling, Hume considers their organization in time; when defining time, Hume thinks about aesthetic qualities that arise from organizational patterns. Throughout the Treatise we find a homology between sensibility and temporal process, and between particular varying manifestations of sensibility and particular varying patterns of temporal process.¹²

Crafting the Succession of Ideas: Addison and Diderot on the Pleasures of Reading

In a beautiful examination of the way walks—actual physical movement along varying architectural paths—shape Addison’s model of the mind, Sean Silver discovers recurrent interchanges of design and nature, representations and originals. While the walk as a whole follows a predesigned path, certain moments of prospect invite the walker to digress on his own reflective rambles. Good writing in Addison’s estimation works similarly, according to Silver, with a well-ordered composition that includes well-placed opportunities for readers to digress on their own imaginative excursions. “These ‘hints’ are the opportunity, as the etymology of the words suggests, for the reader to be ‘seized’ by a moment; they activate the imagination’s secondary pleasures, those pleasures that occur when ‘the imagination takes [a] hint’—or, we might suspect, is taken by one—‘and leads us unexpectedly into cities or theatres, plains or meadows.’”¹³ This double principle of the workings of the mind, Silver argues, aligns Addison with his contemporary associationists. In Addison’s model the task of the poet is “to create an image in such a way that it prompts a rich chain of pleasurable associations in the mind of his anticipated reader” (140). Addison’s “empiricist epistemological model adapted to an aesthetics” (136), then, conceives of the mind’s labors through the two principles of well-organized encasement and materialist digression that Silver also finds in Hooke, Locke, and many others.

For my purposes here, Silver’s appraisal of Addison is especially valuable, as it brings us very close to recognizing the temporal dimensions of Addison’s aesthetics. For in the tradition of associationist empiricism, entrusting the poet with eliciting a succession of ideas also entrusts him with mediating readers’ durational experience. But, more like Hume than like Locke, Addison explicitly approaches duration as variously patterned and intensely qualified. And he emphasizes how we can fashion it as such, conceiving of qualitative durational experience as a consequence of crafting. For Addison human time, while contained within an equable flow, does not at all resemble it and is actively and variously shaped by reading materials that prompt varying associative chains.

In his Spectator 476 (5 September 1712), Addison identifies two styles of writing, each differently shaping the experience of its readers by way of the form of succession it promotes:

When I read an Author of Genius, who writes without Method, I fancy myself in a Wood that abounds with a great many noble Objects, rising among one another in the greatest Confusion and Disorder. When I read a Methodical Discourse, I am in a regular Plantation, and can place my self in its several Centers, so as to take a view of all the Lines and Walks that are struck from them. You may ramble in the one a whole Day together, and every Moment discover something or other that is new to you, but when you have done you will have but a confused imperfect Notion of the Place; in the other, your Eye commands the whole Prospect, and gives you such an Idea of it, as is not easily worn out of the Memory. (4:186)¹⁴

The nonmethodical discourse gives pleasures that are physical and serial; it is analogized to a day hike in which visibility is limited but surprising new discoveries and motion abound. The methodical discourse gives pleasures that seem at first to be more purely cognitive and synchronic; it is analogized to the static observation of architecture. The nonmethodical discourse shares a temporal medium with the vehicle of its simile, thus emphasizing duration, while the methodical seems initially to promote the illusion of atemporality by virtue of being coupled in a simile of a spatial, rather than a temporal, medium. And yet Addison begins to suggest the temporal stakes of even the methodical discourse by casting its value in terms of the traces it leaves for future recall. If “your Eye commands the whole Prospect,” this matters only because it “gives you such an Idea of it, as is not easily worn out of the Memory.” This suggests that while the nonmethodical discourse supports the succession of ideas in something like a continuous present—“a whole Day together”—the methodical essay supports the succession of ideas in the future; as the future becomes present, one can connect one’s present ideas to past ones more readily with a methodical essay in store.

Addison continues to develop the value of the methodical discourse by further elaborating on the temporalized trajectories of thought it supports. At stake is not only future recall, but also successive strings issued at present: “When a Man has plann’d his Discourse, he finds a great many Thoughts rising out of every Head, that do not offer themselves upon the general Survey of a Subject. His Thoughts are at the same time more intelligible, and better discover their Drift and Meaning, when they are placed in their proper Lights, and follow one another in a regular Series, than when they are thrown together without Order and Connexion” (4:186). The methodical composition invites “a great many Thoughts rising out of every Head”—successions of ideas that “do not offer themselves upon the general Survey of a Subject” and thus count as digressive, but that are “at the same time” reigned in to discover the “Drift and Meaning” of the author, proceeding in the direction of a future projection for the argument at hand.

Thus both the nonmethodical and methodical compositions promote a pleasure to be had by eliciting and shaping the succession of ideas of their readers, but each uses a different pattern that, in turn, supports different emotions. The first—the rambling walk of an essay—is composed as a meandering line and elicits the feeling of pleasing confusion; the second—organized as a set of points of view—is composed more like a spiraling line that loops forward and back as it also proceeds steadily and gives a reassuring feeling of command. In Chapter 4 we’ll see how these different forms of lines are adapted in later discourses of durational aesthetics—the first develops into the haptic beauty of Hogarth’s serpentine lines and Burke’s curved bodies and is then adapted into the ultimately safe pleasures of Ann Radcliffe’s gothic lines, while the second anticipates Radcliffe’s crucial flagging of recollection in her accounts of how a mind achieves pleasing composure. For now it suffices to recognize the extent to which temporality permeates Addison’s understanding of the pleasure of reading. Whether likened to a rambling walk in the woods or to an ocular prospect of a plantation, reading supports the succession of ideas of readers and gives them a sense of duration. They may “every Moment discover something or other that is new,” or they may have “a Drift” that carries “their own meaning” that also anticipates the meaning of the author. But both models of composition, Addison insists, occasion a succession of ideas and as such shape their readers’ experience of duration into variously formed and felt qualitative experiences.

But if I have been arguing that Addison entrusts leisure reading with the task of mediating qualitative time, then on many accounts reading in the eighteenth century has done nothing but recruit leisure for the purposes of a rational culture with its economic priorities and its chronometric consciousness. Middle-class life in eighteenth-century England had come increasingly to lay stress on a differentiation between work and leisure, which, as Patricia Meyer Spacks points out, “implies a principle of differentiating time.”¹⁵ J. H. Plumb documents how the print industry and literacy helped to differentiate work from leisure. He argues that the explosion in production and dissemination of print was especially remarkable because reading materials could be picked up almost anywhere and anytime, and because it aided the commercial organization of other industries. But Plumb also argues that the difference between work and leisure was quickly eroded by the expansion of work’s utilitarian morality and chronometric rhythms into practices of leisure. He delineates how leisure activities came to be conceived as an exertion to increase social standing, or what we might call cultural capital. Similarly, Franco Moretti explains that leisure came to be moralized as work, and such an approach privileged recursive and systematic forms of writing that rationalize fictional representations, thus making them analogous to an economized public sphere. And Deidre Lynch concludes that one result of such reconceived utility of leisure is that “literature begins to be reconceptualized as a steadying influence on those who love it.”¹⁶ These studies highlight the reliable periodicity of entertainment production and especially of print publication as the most important dimension of the durational experience that leisure activities promote. From the perspective of such periodicity, entertainment looks like a version of clockwork, extending the chronometric logic of usefulness and work into the durational experience of leisure.

Addison, to be sure, endorses the chronometric approach throughout his writings. In Spectator 10 (12 March 1711), he famously addresses “all regulated Families, that set apart an Hour in every Morning for Tea and Bread and Butter; and would earnestly advise them for their Good to order this Paper to be punctually served up, and to be looked upon as a Part of the Tea Equipage” (1:44–45). Sherman persuasively details Addison’s contribution to the fashioning of a chronometric consciousness based on such recurring invocations of the reliable periodicity of journal publication. In these contributions, Sherman explains, Addison promotes “a diurnal paradigm for achieving, recognizing, and inhabiting the fullness of time.”¹⁷ But while Addison routinely makes the case for the potential usefulness of reading, he also often insists that both this usefulness and this time rely on a different logic from the economized values of work. In Spectator 287 (29 January 1712), he emphasizes that entertainment responds to needs other than our ambitions in work: “We look out for Pleasures and Amusements; and among a great number of idle People, there will be many whose Pleasures will lie in Reading and Contemplation” (3:21), he writes. And he often considers the pleasure of reading and contemplation as a pause from the demands for action constantly pressing on us in daily life; aesthetic pleasure promotes a special “time or leisure to reflect” (3:569), he argues in Spectator 418 (30 June 1712). Such discussions not only chart real differences between various kinds of ordinary activities but also differentiate among genres of leisure reading by the varying ways form directs the succession of ideas.

Addison makes this point most directly in his notes on time in Spectator 94 (18 June 1711), where he takes up Locke’s primary definition of duration from the Essay, while also suggesting that Locke’s analysis begs for a distinction between quantities and qualities. If, as Michael Ketcham argues and as subsequent scholars have tended to accept, “The Spectator in effect dramatizes Locke’s account of duration,” then this dramatization serves to think through those details of quality whose tension with Locke’s focus on measures relegates to the status of implications rather than propositions.¹⁸ Addison begins by defining duration as the succession of ideas and proposing to “carry this Thought further, and consider a Man as, on one Side, shortening his Time by thinking on nothing, or but a few things; so, on the other, as lengthening it, by employing his Thoughts on many Subjects, or by entertaining a quick and constant Succession of Ideas” (1:399). But soon Addison points out the improbability of our cogitations extending our lives, and he shifts the terms of the discussion from measuring the expanse of any given duration to assessing the feelings it generates. He presents an anecdote about a sultan who immerses his head in water for a few seconds and experiences an alternate life in which he achieves as much as rising, falling, marrying, and giving birth to seven sons and daughters. Such “Eastern Fables” (1:401), Addison explains, illustrate a cosmological truth: God’s eternal nature can scramble human time at will, “mak[ing] a single Day, nay a single Moment, appear to any of his Creatures as a thousand Years” (1:401). But to Mr. Spectator and his English readers, contemplating alternate durations yields different conclusions— conclusions more adequate to their own experiences of the empirical world: “The Hours of a wise Man are lengthened by his Ideas, as those of a Fool are by his Passions: The Time of the one is long, because he does not know what to do with it; so is that of the other, because he distinguishes every Moment of it with some useful or amusing Thought; or in other Words, because the one is always wishing it away, and the other always enjoying it” (1:401). Thus the lesson of Spectator 94 is to keep oneself busy with leisure reading such as that offered by Addison’s journal, but not because a reader lives longer than the fool or even because he feels as though he does. Both endure and experience their durations as having a similar expanse, but the wise man enjoys his time while the fool is bored with it.

One purpose of the eastern fable within this number is to contrast a probabilistic chronometric assessment of time—how long actions must take compared with the length of time allotted to them in a narrative—with a qualitative assessment—the feelings a narrative generates. One moment with one’s head under water may feel like a hundred years; this defies a reader’s probabilistic expectations, but it does generate awe-inspiring wonder. Yet as we have seen, Addison also insists that the chronometric is far from the only temporal logic to shape his writing and to affect his readers’ durational experience. And thus the eastern fable of Spectator 94 also serves a second purpose: to suggest how different aesthetic forms varyingly construct durational qualities for their readers. The eastern fable transports readers to other times and places—from England to the East, from witnessing a head momentarily immersed in water to following an entire lifetime. Spectator essays, alternatively, transform readers’ own time—from dull fixations or passionate eruptions to more safely enjoyable pleasures, or, as Addison puts it in the beginning of the essay, “Thoughts on many Subjects … entertaining a quick and constant Succession of Ideas.” And with this Addison indicates that duration varies not only by whether we approach it quantitatively or qualitatively, but also by how different compositional principles shape our experience of it. The genre of the eastern fable mediates for readers other-worldly transport replete with awe-inspiring achievements; the genre of the periodical essay mediates for readers more ordinary emotional qualities.

Addison’s discussion is, of course, Orientalist in Edward Said’s sense, using an “eastern fable” as a vehicle for formulating insights about Addison’s own English sense of time. As Srinivas Aravamudan points out, the oriental tale was extremely popular in England in the early and mid-eighteenth century, “trolling for the same readers” as realist genres, which suggests that Addison uses this anecdote to comment about English readers’ expectations and experiences of their leisure reading materials more than about those of easterners.¹⁹ Moreover, scholars have recently presented the contrast that Addison maps geographically as a historical succession of chronotopes—from the emblematic to the chronometric, and from the romance to the novel. The temporal conception of Addison’s “East” resembles in crucial ways the Christian framework of eternity and its emblematic resonances of moments, even as it is being supplanted by a historicist paradigm organized by linear succession in rational grids.²⁰ It also resembles romance’s spatiotemporal transports that leave no trace on psychologies and bodies, to recall Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of adventure time and Patricia Parker’s discussion of digressions, which I discuss in the Introduction. But in Addison we can already begin to see how sensibility refigures romance, as the spatiotemporal transports of fable are undermined by the emotional transports of the periodical essay, which may be equally digressive but, nonetheless, retain a strong connection to people’s ordinary experiences in their ordinary lives.²¹

As I argue in the Introduction, the sensibility chronotope adapts, rather than more simply negates and supplants, the romance chronotope. We can see especially well such adaptation at work in Diderot’s essay “In Praise of Richardson” (1762). Diderot combines Addison’s genres of the eastern fable and the periodical essay by describing a probable novel in the vocabulary of romance abundance, while transforming spatiotemporal transports into purely durational intensities—diverse qualitative temporal experience. When reading Richardson’s novels, Diderot explains, “In the space of a few hours I had been through a host of situations which the longest life can scarcely provide in its whole course. I had heard the genuine language of the passions; I had seen the secret springs of self-interest and self-love operating in a hundred different ways; I had become privy to a multitude of incidents and I felt I had gained in experience” (83).²² If a few hours with a Richardson novel offer more intense and varied experience than an average lifetime, then the duration of reading is of such a unique quality that it cannot possibly be assessed by chronometric measures. And yet if such overabundance recalls Addison’s eastern fable, then Diderot emphasizes that reading Richardson doesn’t take us elsewhere, but rather enables us to experience our own time more intensely: “The world we live in is his scene of action…. The passions he portrays are those I feel within me…. He shows me the general course of life as I experience it” (83). Addison primarily describes durational experience in an intellectual vocabulary of the succession of ideas—the “useful or amusing Thought” that leisure reading prompts in the wise man of number 94, the “notions,” “ideas,” “thoughts,” and “meaning” that a methodical essay promotes in number 476, and, more generally, “the time and leisure to reflect” of number 418. Diderot overhauls the vocabulary of thinking into the vocabulary of feeling, as might be expected of a sentimentalist of the midcentury for whom, as Jessica Riskin reminds us, “Sensibility was the ‘first germ of thought’ and ‘the most beautiful, the most singular phenomenon of nature.’”²³ But even as for Diderot thinking and feeling are continuous, it is precisely the shift from one to the other that emphasizes the extent to which the incorporation of romance into a specifically durational aesthetics is at stake. For when the intensities of adventure (a key to romance) are rewritten into the intensities of feeling in novels such as Richardson’s, then we can confidently inhabit a sensibility chronotope that does not violate spatiotemporal probabilities by insisting that transport belongs with the varieties of qualitative duration. As Diderot follows the characters and plots in Richardson’s novels, he barely moves in space or time; but within this more probable stationary position he is moved to feel strongly and, most important, diversely—a succession of feelings that enable us to fully recognize the reappraisal of quantities as qualities and the refiguration of romance into the sensibility chronotope.

In his adaptation of fable to cohere with essay and of romance to cohere with novel, Diderot flags for us the way in which the chronometric and sensibility chronotopes complement one another. But this is far from being his last word about the relation between these different temporal conceptions. For in Diderot’s estimation—as in many more recent accounts of the rationalizations of modernity—the quantitative and the qualitative jostle over the same turf. “Take care not to open one of these enchanting works if you have any duties to perform” (85), Diderot begins; and he concludes with pathos: “Emily, Charlotte, Pamela, dear Miss Howe, as I talk with you, the years of toil and the harvest of laurels fall away, and I go forward to my last hour, abandoning every project which might also recommend me to future ages” (97). One might either assess one’s exertions by counting the hours, days, years it takes to accomplish a task, or one might immerse oneself in the duration and assess its value by the various feelings it conveys and, thus, lose count of time. But Diderot presents himself as among the few who privilege their qualitative durational experience over the demands of a chronometric public sphere. What Addison identifies as an individual philosopher’s oversight—Locke’s failure to directly specify qualitative dimensions of time—Diderot suggests is a more pervasive problem of modern culture. Richardson’s greatness, he argues, rests not simply on his novels’ excellent mimesis of the ordinary but, rather, in their defamiliarization of the ordinary: his novels draw attention to mundane actions’ durations to which his contemporaries have been desensitized by chronometric habits. “You accuse Richardson of being long-drawn-out!” Diderot writes, and then returns the accusation: “You must have forgotten how much trouble, care and activity it takes to accomplish the smallest undertaking, to see a lawsuit through, to arrange a marriage, to bring about a reconciliation. Think what you will of these details…. They are trivial, you say; it’s something we see every day! You are wrong; it is something which takes place every day before your eyes but which you never see” (86). Richardson’s novels restore people’s sense of the duration of ordinary actions such as marriage and contract, which we no longer seem to notice, and such desensitization arises from overlooking the varying qualities of attention solicited by the durations that these actions inhabit. If a courtship, lawsuit, or reconciliation may be chronometrically summarized to have occupied twelve months, two years, or a decade, such summaries eclipse the abundance of “trouble, care and activity” that one must have experienced while in the midst of these endeavors. With this Diderot flags another way by which sensibility adapts romance: it turns the early genre’s loosely stitched digressions into a length necessary for a truer verisimilitude of action as it constitutes character. And finally, Diderot flags the way in which quantitative assessments overrun all attempts to make the qualitative cohere with the quantitative. The quantitative way of knowing, he suggests, habitualizes time so thoroughly that many cannot tolerate Richardson’s novels’ demands for reactivation of the sensations of original durations.²⁴

In the next paragraph Diderot attributes the temporal compression to which his contemporaries have been habituated to market-driven theatrical aesthetics that shorten and thin out audiences’ capacities for absorption. “For a people open to a thousand distractions, whose days have not enough hours for all the amusements with which they are wont to fill them, Richardson’s books must seem long…. You hardly ever go to see more than the last act of a tragedy. Skip to the last twenty pages of Clarissa” (86), he remarks sarcastically. An incredibly productive entertainment industry, rather than oversaturating the market, successfully adapts consumers to its needs by limiting their capacities for absorption. Here we have a synchronic jostling between a modern incarnation of the romance chronotope and its refiguration in sensibility. The entertainment industry—with its “thousand distractions” deliberately connoting romance and fabled incredulity—has turned consumers’ lives into loosely connected episodes of leisure, making the lengths of their endurance nothing but a series of distractions. Richardson’s novels, by contrast, restore us to an inabstractable duration—you must twine your duration with them, for a summary would just miss the point. The durations these novels take are constitutive of their meaningfulness, and if you fully grant them their time they will reward you by restoring thick qualities to your own temporal experience.²⁵ Reading novels like Richardson’s—novels of sensibility—fashions subjectivities alert to duration as a continuous whole saturated with a variety of feelings; in contrast, the entertainment industry fashions distracted subjectivities, whose sense of time is fragmented into discrete moments that come in no necessary order. Fragmented form makes such time easily alienable and more akin to other commodities in the market that engenders it—a moment at the theater swappable with a moment at a pleasure garden, again swappable with reading the first few pages of a novel. In Diderot’s account, absorption in Richardson’s novels ameliorates this condition by restoring to actions their durations, thus making any moment tied more strongly to the full process of which it partakes.

For Diderot, Richardson’s novels are a palliative not only for fragmentable, alienable time, but also more generally for the alienated individualism that Diderot seems to suppose—like more recent critics of modernity—as the condition of his world. For Richardson’s novels, Diderot argues, are his companions, and their companionship is peculiarly durational: “I still remember the first time I came across Richardson’s work: I was in the country. How delightfully moved I was by them! With every moment I saw my time of happiness growing a page shorter. Soon I had the same feeling as is experienced by men who get on extremely well together and, having been together for a long time, are about to separate” (84). Diderot characterizes his “first time” with Richardson by his being “delightfully moved”; his happiness glossed as a dreading of time running out; his attachment identified as a long-forged familiarity soon destined to end. But even more interestingly, Diderot describes the friendship of novels as the pleasure we derive from conversing with friends. Recall that he concludes his praise by exclaiming with pathos: “Emily, Charlotte, Pamela, dear Miss Howe, as I talk with you, the years of toil and the harvest of laurels fall away, and I go forward to my last hour, abandoning every project which might also recommend me to future ages” (97). Richardson’s novels divert Diderot from the pursuit of worldly achievements, but they reward him not only with a high quality and inalienable durational experience but also with companions to converse with. Novels provide Diderot with friends, and friendship is specified as the uniquely emotional duration of intimate conversation.

In Spectator 225 (17 November 1711) Addison comments that “the Talking with a Friend is nothing else but thinking aloud” (2:375). And thinking aloud, like writing essays, benefits from selection and composition, as Addison’s defense of discretion throughout this essay suggests. Thus we might conclude that companionate conversation amounts to the succession of ideas in common—the primary experience of duration as it is shaped not just by compositional forms, but also more specifically by discursive forms that are inherently social. For both Addison and Diderot, at stake in compositional forms is communication—the succession of ideas not in solipsistic privacy but in social circumstances, whether in intimate conversation or in print. This social dimension of human durational experience is harder to gauge when examining Locke’s and Hume’s philosophies of time; however, insofar as Hume approaches duration as aesthetic form—a logic of composition that must be sensibly apprehended—he underlines the constitutive communicability of qualitative duration. For a logic of composition—a pattern—is what makes something iterable—recognizable to another person and, thus, potentially shared.²⁶