Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s by Nemerov Alexander

Author:Nemerov, Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400844883
Publisher: Princeton University Press

28 Bourke-White, Wherever we flew we found the face of Italy scarred like the face of the moon, ca. 1943–44. Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images.

MacLeish, who visited the factory with Bourke-White in 1929, distinguishes in the essay between bottled and raw time. “To the watchmaker, time is a commodity extracted from the universe and bottled for domestic needs.” It is different from the raw time of the universe, which is not really time at all. Focusing on the watch company’s astronomer, Mr. Urie, who attempts to determine sidereal time—time as measured by the stars—MacLeish notes that the “commodity [Urie] so carefully extracts from the stars is almost certainly not there at all,” that physicists would not agree that there is anything like time actually out there to be recovered, and that Urie is consequently “like the fisherman who scooped his shadow from the sea . . . a harvester of illusion.” But MacLeish concedes that time is “the prime necessity of our age,” and so he grants the astronomer his illusory exactitude, and the factory its way of synchronizing the reputed time of the stars with the time of its watches.

Bourke-White’s watch photograph is about the factory’s bottling of time. It also implies that photography itself cannot help but be a bottling of time, something like Dorothea Lange’s idea that being a photographer was like trying to catch lightning in a bottle. But what about time in the raw? A few years before the Elgin Watch essay appeared in Fortune, MacLeish wrote his most famous poem, “You, Andrew Marvell,” about the turning sensation of cosmic time experienced by one person as night comes on. The poem begins:

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