Time at Blackburn Cathedral

Last week we visited Blackburn Cathedral for the latest immersive by Luxmuralis: Time. We walked through the Cathedral immersed in a light and sound show, totally amazing. I particularly enjoyed the narrative which played as we gazed at the light show. The description of the immersive explained the experience: "You'll be taken on a journey through time, traversing wormholes, venturing inside the intricate workings of clocks, and experiencing a dramatic narrative that spans from the very beginning of everything to the present day." 

As I walked through the Cathedral as well as the spoken narrative, I was also thinking about time in literature. For me everything also comes back to books! T S Eliot's Burnt Norton was the first poem that came to mind:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind. 

Next, I thought about Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress, another poet and poem I absolutely love:

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain.  

Then, my mind turned to novels. It seems appropriate that I am currently reading Elly Griffiths' The Killing Time. This is the second novel in her series about time travel and crime, and contains some wonderful descriptions of moving from one time to another. 

I have always loved time slip novels, I was introduced to them at an early age through novels such as Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden, Lucy M Boston's The Children of Green Knowe and Antonia Barber's The Ghosts. All of these novels feature time travel and time slip narratives, with past and present co-existng in a particular place. In Tom's Midnight Garden it is the clock striking thirteen which shifts time backwoods and in The Ghosts the children all co-exist and can travel between time in the same place.

The immersive caused me to realise how much I love the concept of time travel in fiction, as well as "time's winged chariot" in poetry. William Shakespeare has a lot to say about time, especially in his Sonnets, most of it rather depressing. Sonnet 106:

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights...

We are really enjoying the immersive experience and I found this one particularly thought provoking.