Timely Untimely: The Rhythm of Things and the Time of Life

This article presents an understanding of time and temporality as adverbial. In normal discourse we speak of time as a condition of action, thought, and events: to intervene in a timely fashion, to live anachronistically or to be before her time. Adverbially understood, time is experienced in terms of an oscillation between the timely and the untimely. Crucial to this is rhythm, and access to time so understood is acoustic rather than visual. We hear time, we do not see it, or if we do see time we do so only through its rhythmic, acoustic, and indeed musical structure. Discussing the Book of Ecclesiastes, and such philosophers such as Nancy and Lefebvre, as well as music theorists, this article articulates the different rhythms of the timely untimely. It shows time as a living rhythm between the energy of beginnings and mechanicity.