How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Act.Scene)
Quote #1
Thomasina: You can't stir things apart.
Septimus: No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it forever. This is known as free will or self-determination. (1.1)
Wait a minute – Septimus is talking about two entirely different things here, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and free will. Or perhaps he's making an ironic connection – even if we do have free will in the short term, the Second Law means we'll all eventually end up as mush anyway.
Quote #2
Thomasina: If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could. (1.1)
If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? And if an equation exists, but no one can calculate it out, does it matter?
Quote #3
[stage direction] During the course of the play the table collects this and that, and where an object from one scene would be an anachronism in another (say a coffee mug) it is simply deemed to have become invisible. By the end of the play the table has collected an inventory of objects. (1.2)
Yes, in a play, stage directions are up for analysis too. The table is an interesting illustration of what the play says in other ways as well: that what survives to the end is not necessarily complete, or even important. Yet, while the table and its accumulation of things may seem random, these objects have survived from the past into the present through a logical progression of history.
Quote #4
Septimus: We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew? (1.3)
Septimus's theory is kind of similar to the idea that enough monkeys at enough typewriters for enough time would produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. It's a rare idea that would occur to only one person in the entire course of human history.
Quote #5
Hannah: The weather is fairly predictable in the Sahara.
Valentine: The scale is different but the graph goes up and down the same way. Six thousand years in the Sahara looks like six months in Manchester, I bet you. (2.4)
It seems time is similar to the fractals Valentine talks about – you can zoom in and out, and see the same patterns on different scales.
Quote #6
Bernard: I'll tell you your problem. No guts.
Hannah: Really?
Bernard: By which I mean a visceral belief in yourself. Gut instinct. The part of you which doesn't reason. The certainty for which there is no back-reference. Because time is reversed. Tock, tick goes the universe and then recovers itself, but it was enough, you were in there and you bloody know. (1.4)
All that stuff about time only going in one direction, towards disorder – Bernard doesn't believe a word of it. The experience he describes here, of a certainty that transcends time, is almost mystical, though of course Bernard manages to express it in his usual annoying way.
Quote #7
Valentine: There wasn't enough time before. There weren't enough pencils! (He flourishes Thomasina's lesson book.) This took her I don't know how many days and she hasn't scratched the paintwork. Now she'd only have to press a button, the same button over and over. Iteration. A few minutes. And what I've done in a couple of months, with only a pencil the calculations would take me the rest of my life to do again – thousands of pages – tens of thousands! And so boring! (1.4)
It's interesting to think of time as flexible in this way – that changes in technology can actually produce time (when there wasn't "enough" before).
Quote #8
Hannah: And then he didn't sail until the beginning of July!
Bernard: Everything moved more slowly then. Time was different. He was two weeks in Falmouth waiting for wind or something – (2.5)
Here's another take on the how time itself (or at least the human perception of it) changes based on historical circumstances – Bernard seems to be arguing that, since technology used to be slower (sailing ships vs. the bullet train), people actually acted differently. Or perhaps he's just trying to pull together the ill-fitting parts of his Byron theory.
Quote #9
Valentine: A film of a pendulum, or a ball falling through the air – backwards, it looks the same. [...] But with heat – friction – a ball breaking a window -- [...] It won't work backwards. [...] She saw why. You can put back the bits of glass but you can't collect up the heat of the smash. It's gone. (2.7)
It's interesting that Valentine calls upon film for his example – another technology that changed human perception of the world. Actually seeing things go backwards, or sped up, or slowed down, was all impossible before film came along. How do the possibilities created by other technologies affect the way we think about time?
Quote #10
Valentine: And everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly . . . [...] . . . till there's no time left. That's what time means. (2.7)
So what is it that time means, again? At its most basic level, according to Valentine, it means you can't go back into history – unless, of course, you're writing or reading a play that does exactly that. How might reading or seeing Arcadia, or any other historical text, differ from actually taking a spin to the nineteenth century?