Cortázar at Berkeley

In 1980, Julio Cortázar taught eight classes at Berkeley. The classes were reflections on his own career as much as they were about books and the current historical moment. The following is taken from the second class, on time in the fantastic short story. 

The time has come to talk about time, which is going to sort of be the subject of this part of our talk today. Time is a problem that goes way beyond literature and encompasses the very essence of man. Ever since the first babblings of philosophy, notions of time and space have constituted two of the most basic problems. A person who is not philosophical, not problematical, accepts time as a given. Ever since the pre-Socratics, since Heraclitus, for example — one of the first to weigh in on the problem — the nature of this that we cannot define as a substance or an element or a thing is an age-old metaphysical problem with different solutions. (Human vocabulary can’t grasp the essence of time, which passes through us and we pass through it.) For someone like Kant, time in itself doesn’t exist; it is a category of understanding. We are the ones who create time. For Kant, animals don’t live in time; we see them living in time, but they don’t because they have no temporal consciousness. For an animal there is no present or past or future, they exist totally outside of the temporal. Humans are endowed with a sense of time. For Kant, time is inside us; for other philosophers, it is an element, an essence that exists outside us and within which we are encompassed. This has led to an enormous amount of philosophical, and even scientific, literature, which maybe will never come to an end.

I don’t know if there’s anybody here who understands the theory of relativity — not I, needless to say — but I do know that the notion of time changed after Albert Einstein’s discoveries. There used to be a notion about the course, the duration, of time, which mathematicians now figure into their calculations in a different way. Then there are those phenomena that have been studied by parapsychologists — the real kind, the scientific ones — and there is a famous book by the Englishman, Dunne, An Experiment with Time, which Borges sometimes quotes because it fascinated him. Dunne analyzes the possibilities of a variety of times (not only this one that we acknowledge, the one measured by watches and calendars); they are simultaneous and parallel, based on the well-known phenomenon of premonition — when someone suddenly has a vision of something that happens five days later. Something that is the future for us, at the moment of the premonition, isn’t the future...