Dear list,
Has anyone previously noted Samuel Alexander's Space, time, and deity: the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow: 1916-1918 in relation to Ada? The text does in fact contain the "hours to a fly" quote attributed to S. Alexander on pp. 542-3 of Ada. Here is the line from Alexander:
Neither the poet nor the philosopher means merely that what is years to us is a moment to God, in the same way as a moment
to a man may be hours to a fly with his microscopic measures of duration.
Alexander was a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and taught at the University of Manchester. His Lectures were published in book form in England in 1920. He was strongly influenced by Henri Bergson (also referenced in Ada).
There are a great many thematic parallels between the "Texture of Time" in Ada and Alexander's work, though Van seems to draw distinctions between his ideas and Alexander's. Here is a sample passage from Alexander on repetition:
But the repetition of a point at many instants, its recurrence, secures to the point this capacity ; or if the more demonstrative form
of words be preferred, in order that Time should linger Space must recur, a point must be repeated in more than one instant.
In his approach to time and space, Alexander, too, addresses Bergson's work, as well as Einstein's.
I know Leona Toker has already considered Bergson and Nabokov. Does anyone know of scholarship regarding Alexander in Ada?
Thanks much,
Andrea
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