In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

238 ARRAYS
appearance. In the roar of excess, feelings have far outdistanced the
bounds of human values. Courage, pity, fear-none of these exist any
more. There remains only a whirling system of power in which landscapes
and people are included as if it were a different zone, subject to
different laws. At 9:40 it will be in place" (Junger, 11 0-111). The
artillery attack begins at 5 :05 A.M., and will be followed by a ground
assault at 9:40 A.M. The sheer presence of timepieces provides a certain
amount of structure amid the chaos of war. For individual soldiers, they
offer an existential "direction" toward the immediate future, a direction
that gives shape and vitality to their actions: "We're in that wilderness
where one laughs while one's teeth are chattering, the senses keyed up to
an incredible acuteness, as before a great, decisive deed. Early in the
morning I speak with the battalion commander for the last time, and we
synchronize our watches to the second. We part with a firm handshake.
From now on we're completely focused, each of us following the steady
movement of the luminous hand on his watch. Every five minutes the
time is called out. An ever shorter distance separates us from the moment,
5:05, at which the artillery assault is supposed to begin" (98-99).
[see Action vs. Impotence] Such an attack, in modern warfare, is the
model for the existential situation which Martin Heidegger metaphorically
describes as "running ahead into death" (Heidegger, 262ff.)-and
which, without time measurement, can never adopt a form (252f£.).
Keeping time requires keeping numerous watches and clocks in parallel,
so that their mutual confirmation can substitute for the lack of a
natural ground. This is the insight that the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch
takes away from a visit to the Hydrographic Institute of the Austrian
navy: "Every clock has its moment of adjustment: at the same time every
day, each one is wound up in a predetermined order ... The question
'Excuse me, do you have the time?' is easily asked, but is not easily
answered by the expert" (Kisch, 198). Time that is kept in the form of
a constant rhythm needs to be publicly visible. Perhaps the seven-yearold
Antoine in Jules Supervielle's novel Le voleur d'enfants (The Man
Who Stole Children) would not get lost in the bustling streets of Paris if
he could only read the huge clock standing next to him: "For a good five
minutes he has been alone with a kind of shame or dread, he could not
say which. Night falls. Paris begins to close in on Antoine. To his right
there is a pneumatic clock. If only he could tell the time, he would feel
less alone. This white face with its two hands stubbornly remains unrec-