EP35: Ilya Bernstein’s The Notes of a Curious Bystander is a philosophical text devoted to that which philosophy, with side-curved head, loves to contemplate above all else: time.

Specifically, it explores a contrast between two ways of thinking about temporality: in terms of sequential units, and in terms of scaling units. Although both ways of thinking are commonplace and the contrast between them is a simple one, when it is made explicitly, and presented not just as a contrast but as a conflict, it proves to be extraordinarily fertile.

The notes that comprise Bernstein’s text elaborate the significance of this contrast for our pragmatic and epistemological relationships with time – and draw out its rich implications, as they impress time’s curious bystander, for fields of inquiry devoted to processes that take place over time (biology, law, economics, linguistics) and for forms of creativity that unfold over time (poetry, music, mathematics, and others).

Overall, as Bernstein writes in his preface to The Notes of a Curious Bystander, the text represents an attempt to “grab hold of time . . . and to get something out of it.”

Ilya Bernstein is a writer of poetry and philosophy. His publications include two books of poetry, Distances and Sounds (Ars-Interpres, 2020) and Attention and Man (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003), a collection of poems by Osip Mandelstam in English translation (M-Graphics, 2020), and a collection of his own writings in Danish translation, Både og (Det Poetiske Bureaus Forlag, 2021).