Academic Hour
10:15 Scholē. Leisure first, school only later. Arist. Met. 981b: the sciences that serve neither pleasure nor necessity arose first where people had leisure. Mathematics in Egypt, "because there the priestly class was allowed scholē". L.: an academic hour is forty-five minutes. Listed for 10:00, begins at 10:15. The academic quarter, more on it at the end.
So a school is first a place where you do not have to, and only later a place where you learn. The Greek word says that first there was not-having-to, and learning came afterwards, as the thing people do when they do not have to. Which means I am sitting inside a word that means the absence of compulsion, and I am compelled to be here until 11:00, because of the attendance list. The priests were allowed. Allowed, meaning someone else was not, because someone had to be gathering grain at that hour so that a priest could do nothing and invent geometry. He did not say who. A peasant on the Nile. I write it down because the lecturer did not say it, and it seems to me more important than what he did say.
A room is the purchased absence of other people. Working definition, we are to use it to the end.
10:22 Sartre, 1943. Meeting Pierre at the café at four, arrives a quarter of an hour late. The café is full. He sees the absence of Pierre. He does not see the absence of Wellington, although Wellington is not there either. Bergson: "there is none" always means "I was looking for something else and found this". Absence is a property of expectation, not of the world.
Testing it on myself. I walk into this room and Marta is not here. But there are forty people in the room, so there is no absence in the room, there are forty people in the room. The absence is in me, because Marta was supposed to be here. Had we not arranged it, the room would simply be full, the way it is full for everyone who is waiting for nobody. So the absence is not on the chair, the absence is in the arrangement. Which means, further, that the world is always full, and only the one who was waiting for something has holes in him. Which means, further still, that if I wait for nothing, I lack nothing, and that sounds like peace, but it also sounds like an ending, because someone who lacks nothing will also invent nothing, because to invent something is to notice that it is not there. The mouse. Someone noticed there was nothing to point at a spot on a screen with. To notice that, you had to be waiting for something that did not exist, and have the time to wait. Who paid him to wait.
10:31. Lost nine minutes. He is already on Woolf.
Woolf. Two lectures, Newnham 20 Oct 1928 and Girton 26 Oct 1928. The society at Girton was called ODTAA: One Damn Thing After Another. Thesis: a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Where the money came from: an aunt, Mary Beton, fell from her horse in Bombay, "riding out to take the air", and left five hundred pounds a year for ever. The solicitor's letter arrived the same night the act was passed that gave votes to women. "Of the two, the vote and the money, the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important." Dinner at the men's college: sole, partridges. At the women's: beef, prunes and custard. One cannot think well if one has not dined well. Judith Shakespeare: the sister, the same gift, not sent to school, not a line. Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Judith did not exist. Woolf invented her. So she did exactly what Sartre did with Pierre: she made an appointment with someone for the year 1600, then walked into the year 1600 and saw that she was not there. Before her nobody had seen that absence, because nobody had an appointment; the shelf of English literature was full, like the café. Which would mean that an absence in history has to be manufactured before it can be seen, and manufacturing an absence costs five hundred a year, because someone who has not dined is looking at the plate. The money came from Bombay. Someone in Bombay had no room so that Woolf could see that Judith had had no room. And that would mean that
From the floor: and who is paying for this room? L.: I will come back to that.
10:37 The register of rooms. Copying the table off the board, three columns plus a name.
| room | who had it | who paid | who profited |
|---|---|---|---|
| Egypt | the priests | a peasant on the Nile | geometry, i.e. everyone |
| Woolsthorpe 1665-66 | Newton, 18 months | the plague; Trinity closed | everyone after him |
| Bern 1902-09 | Einstein, technical expert third class | the Swiss Confederation | physics |
| Bell Labs 1947 | Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley | the AT&T subscriber | everyone: 1956 decree, patents free |
| Menlo Park 1964 | Engelbart | ARPA, the taxpayer | Apple, licence for $40,000 |
| Palo Alto 1970 | PARC, 3,000 miles from head office | offices paying per copy | Apple, after the visit of Dec 1979 |
| Cambridge 1928 | Woolf | Bombay | literature |
| San Francisco 2015 | a foundation | donors | a corporation, from Oct 2025 |
L.: look at the last two columns. They do not share a single row. Whoever pays for the room does not use it. Whoever uses it did not pay. The profit goes to a third person.
Eight out of eight. That is a rule. Checking it against this room. The lecturer has the room, and we do. The rector pays, meaning the budget, meaning tax, meaning the woman at the till in the Żabka on the corner, who at this moment has time for nothing and is paying for me to have time to sit and hear about Sartre. Who will profit: not her. Nobody knows who, someone later, someone who will take something out of this room and sell it as his own, like Jobs in December 1979. So the question from the floor was a good one and the lecturer knew it, which is why he said he would come back.
Checking it against myself, because that is easier than against the Żabka. I have a room. Fourteen square metres, rent due Friday. I have money, from work, where I have to be at 12:00. So I have both of Woolf's things and I pay for them myself, in hours, and then I am not in the room, because I am at work, and when I am in the room I have no hours left. Which means I bought the absence of other people. My own presence was not in the budget. I think that is what the lecturer means, or maybe he does not, maybe that is me.
10:44 Keynes, 1930, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren": in a hundred years three hours a day, "for three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us". Annual hours worked, OECD average: 1,966 in 1970, 1,751 in 2020. He was right, they fell. Mark, Irvine, attention on a single screen: 2004 two and a half minutes, 2012 seventy-five seconds, recent years forty-seven, median forty. The free hours came. The continuity did not. L.: Woolf's sentence has been incomplete since about 2004. Money and a room stopped implying time, because time stopped arriving in one piece.
So Keynes was right about the hours. There was a second thing to lose and he did not know about it. An hour is not the unit of thought. The unit of thought is however long one thought lasts without interruption, and that is now forty-seven seconds, less than this note in the margin. Checking against myself: I have been writing this for longer than forty-seven seconds already, so at this moment I am an exception to the average, and I think that is why I am writing it, to check how long I can, and now I do not know whether I am writing because I am thinking or thinking because I am writing, and that is the hole I fall into, because if a thought lasts only as long as its writing down, then Woolf's room is not a room, it is a sheet of paper, and five hundred a year buys the sheet and the time to write one thought to its end, and the nine minutes I lost at 10:22 were exactly such a sheet, only I do not know whether I was in the room then or outside it, because from the outside it looks the same: a person not taking notes, and then
10:58 L.: the first duty of a lecturer, according to Woolf: to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth "to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever". She refused. He refuses too. Instead, the quarter: for centuries lectures were held in the professors' private rooms, scattered across the town. Time was kept by the clock on the tower. After the hour struck, a student had a quarter of an hour to walk from one room to the next. The academic quarter is the price of the room, paid with the feet. The academic hour is what is left after paying. It is ending now. Please count how many times in these forty-five minutes you looked at your
Evening, in the room.
From Marta, who was there: between 10:31 and 10:37 it was Newton. The plague, summer 1665, Cambridge closed, he goes home to Woolsthorpe. Eighteen months. The calculus by the end of 1666. Marta wrote: "the plague as payer". And Einstein in Bern, technical expert third class, a gravel sorter and an electric typewriter on his desk, seven years. She wrote: "the patent office as room, the state as aunt".
He did not come back to the question from the floor.
I looked at my phone four times. I am not counting the nine minutes at 10:22, and I do not know how to count what I cut off at 10:58. I do not know whether those were minutes in the room or outside it. The notebook does not show that. The notebook only shows that I was not writing.