This piece develops some of the reflections I first
explored in my 2019 essay, The Rhapsody of Time Passing. I have been thinking
of the phrase "unattended moment" and-the "moment in and out of
time" in T S Eliot's Four Quartets. And the "decisive moment" as
described by the photographer Cartier-Bresson. There seems to me to be a profound
connection between these two descriptions of a moment in time. Here, I take a wander around that connection.
The Rhapsody of the Instant
There are moments when time behaves itself, and others when
it seems to slip sideways. I have long been intrigued by that small perceptual
glitch when one glances at a wristwatch and the second hand appears to
hesitate, or even move backwards, before settling into its steady march. It is
a trivial experience, yet it unsettles something fundamental. The mind expects
continuity; the eye reports a stutter. And in that stutter lies a reminder that
our access to reality is never as clean or as linear as we imagine.
If time is made of units — seconds, nanoseconds, whatever
smallest bead the physicists may one day name — then what occupies the space
between the beads? A friend once described this as a kind of cosmic abacus, the
universe clicking its way forward. But if that is so, then the gap between the
clicks becomes strangely charged: a place where the mind, reaching for the next
number, finds instead a moment of suspension. A pause that is not quite time
and not quite outside it.
This question — what happens between the units — has
stayed with me. It is the same question that animates so much modern literature
and art: how to reconcile the measurable with the lived, the clock with the
consciousness that resists being parcelled into equal slices.
Bergson's "Pure Duration" and Eliot's Uneasy Struggle
Henri Bergson tried to dissolve the problem by insisting on pure duration, a flow of experience that cannot be chopped into units without doing violence to its nature. Eliot knew Bergson’s thought well; he attended the lectures in Paris in 1910–11, absorbing the promise that time might be experienced as a continuous unfolding rather than a sequence of fatalistic beats.
But in Rhapsody on a Windy Night, written soon after, Eliot turns
away from that optimism. The poem’s speaker walks through the night accompanied
by the mechanical tolling of hours — “Twelve o’clock,” “Half-past one,”
“Half-past two” — while his mind dissolves into involuntary memories. The clock
drives him forward; his consciousness drags him back. No pure duration here.
Only the uneasy duet of habit and dream.
Eliot's "Unattended Moment"
And yet, years later, in Four Quartets, Eliot
discovers something else: not Bergson’s flowing durée, nor the clock’s rigid
divisions, but a moment that arrives unbidden — “the unattended moment, the
moment in and out of time.” This is not a moment seized by perception but one
that interrupts it. A moment that does not belong to the cosmic abacus at all.
It is as if the gap between the beads opens, and something from beyond the
sequence looks back at us.
Cartier-Bresson and Eliot - The Contrast: Within and Without
Cartier‑Bresson, working with a camera rather than a pen,
found his own version of the charged instant. His “decisive moment” is not
outside time but perfectly within it — a fraction of a second in which the
world briefly arranges itself into meaning. A boy leaps over a puddle; a
cyclist flashes past a stairwell; a gesture, a shadow, a geometry align. The
photographer does not create this alignment; he recognises it. His art depends
on a taut, almost instinctive attentiveness. The decisive moment is the instant
when time, usually so indifferent, suddenly reveals its coherence.
Eliot’s moment, by contrast, reveals its transcendence.
Cartier‑Bresson’s is the triumph of perception; Eliot’s is the suspension of
it. One redeems time aesthetically, the other metaphysically. And yet both
arise from the same human bewilderment: the sense that time is not simply
passing but happening — that within its flow there are instants which
feel more real than the rest.
Between the Beats
Perhaps this is why the second hand sometimes seems to
falter when we look at it. Not because time has stumbled, but because our
consciousness has. For a fraction of a second, the mind is caught between the
unit and the duration, between the beat and the flow, between the world as it
is measured and the world as it is lived. In that hesitation lies the
possibility of both the decisive moment and the unattended one — the
photographer’s poised readiness and the poet’s receptive stillness.
The instant, it seems, is never merely an instant. It is a
threshold. A rhapsody. A brief opening in which time reveals its double nature:
the relentless march of the hours, and the mysterious shimmer that lies between
them.
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Postscript — Within You and Without You
It was only after settling on the heading The Contrast - Within and Without that I realised how close it sits to George Harrison’s song Within You Without You. The echo is accidental, but perhaps not entirely. Harrison had an instinctive feel for the doubleness of experience — the inner life unfolding at its own pace, and the outer world pressing forward with its demands. His song turns on that same tension: the self moving through time, and time moving through the self.
Or perhaps he was just a very instinctive songwriter.