Exploring Time through Art and Literature
Time has been an inspiration for artists, writers, and filmmakers. For example, in literature, time travel, memory, and the impermanence of life characterize H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. These pieces indicate how time defines identity and human experience, catching attention to where one sees or reflects on the passage of time in his or her life.
Visual art movements, such as Surrealism, will even question the nature of time itself in our perception. For example, Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory captures melting clocks as symbolic of the fluidity of time, how our minds fudge it, and how filmmakers make use of this manipulation with time as a feature within the narrative to show the depth of emotions and philosophical questions that can be derived from such manipulations of time, as in films like Inception and Interstellar.In this way, we feel time through something new because art is space to bend the laws of physics and reality while entertaining us. Such works inspire another expression of us and our relationship with time.
