A Century, a Lifetime and a Comet

Celebrating the appearance of Halley's Comet in April 1910, Tom Coles (University of Glasgow) ponders comets and periodisation:

"I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out  together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that." 

Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark  Twain, A Biography,
Ch. 282 ‘Personal Memoranda’

Halley’s Comet means almost as much to me as it did to Mark Twain: I was born in early 1986, around the time when it last appeared, and in 2061 when it next approaches close to Earth I suppose I will not be too sad, like Twain, if I leave with it. As a period of study, the 75 years that the comet takes to return is curious, perhaps more useful than the equally arbitrary 'century'. A century tends to be the default time-frame of the rise of empires, the dominance of an art-form, the epoch of a revolution. It has become the primary frame through which we view history, even if we often have to make it ‘long’ and ‘short’. The century is always followed by another century; it is a method of linear chronology that invites concepts of procession or improvement.

We risk fetishizing a unit of time of our own making. In contrast, a comet offers an image of the same object returning unimproved, unadorned, for its own reasons - but measurably. The problem is that one hundred years in any direction is that it is just out of reach. It exists as a social rather than a personal memory. A hundred years is simply a hundred years: within it much can happen while little changes, or much can change with little happening. The world a hundred years ahead or behind is an older or younger peer. The orbital period of Halley’s comet, a single transit of a lump of rock, ice and gases around the sun is, on the other hand, a lifetime. It seems longer, somehow, than a century.

Tycho and Kepler were able to place the comets beyond the moon; to make further roads out of a geocentric totalised world-view; to chalk one up for rationalism. They participate in what Gabriel Josopovici has described in his recent Whatever Happened to Modernism?  as part of a “powerful myth, that of the Renaissance as the triumph of the individual after centuries of subservience to authority and tradition… of light coming out of darkness and the myth of the emancipation of the individual…” (p.11). How does the symbol of this comet, which Halley proved to be engaged in an almost eternal return, fit in with a procession of knowledge unwinding its secrets? If there is no permanent triumph, but only return, how do we create a narrative of our own and others' lives within history?

This contradiction, that the scientific universe is guided by stronger and more rigid rules than those of any social or cultural system that previously claimed to govern our worlds, is what Schiller calls the disenchantment of the world: it is the difficulty that we have when our problems are too satisfactorily explained. Explained in so rigorous a fashion their very rationalism, meeting our needs perfectly, becomes a sort of magic in itself. Knowing that Halley was coming back in 1910 didn’t stop people from claiming that it threatened cataclysm – its very predictability seemed terrifying. The millennial feeling is perhaps the overburdening of what we know to be an arbitrary date. It is simply another day, but because it is ‘simply another day’ how could it possibly survive the weight of expectation we have placed upon it?

Josipovici suggests that to argue over the ‘beginnings’ (and endings) of Modernism as occurring at one date or another, is short-sighted: instead we should be looking at what in the past is still present for us, where we still live in the same space. Rather than looking for what has left or arrived on a certain date, it may be better to look for what came back.

Mark Twain did, after all, die the day after the comet’s appearance, as he promised, on the 21^st April 1910. He was seventy-five. His autobiography, which has been under a publication ban, is to be published in November 2010, one hundred years (and a few months) after his death, as, for his own reasons, he insisted.