Aesthetics and Ephemerality

Construction is ephemeral in its end and process. We may consider construction as the performative instant of finishing production (Taylor 2016) or as a performed sequence of creative moments (Pearson 2010). Reflecting on construction’s ephemerality, this paper reads the surviving portions of a second-century inscription by the Roman engineer Nonius Datus—our only extant account of a major construction project from antiquity.

In the wake of Lessing’s distinction between the spatial-material qualities of the visual arts and the linear-temporal qualities of the verbal, the trope of ekphrasis has been treated as a mediating device between notions of solidity, durability, and permanence on the one hand, and the momentary or ephemeral on the other (Lessing 1766; Fulda 2017).

Shadows are spatial, but lack materiality. They turn space into time. This paper explores the transience of shadows in Latin literature, as designated in particular by the word umbra: as temporal markers, as companions and extensions to humans and objects, as figurative (non-)spaces. It considers their relationship to daylight and the passage of time, and offers connections between their ephemeral status and their presentation as souls, ghosts, and ideas.

This paper reads Sappho’s corpus against two different articulations of the present in lyric poetry: Gallagher’s “formalism of ephemerality” (2006), which argues that lyric is always contending against time and durability, and a special, poetic form of the present as identified in studies of modern lyric (Culler 2015). The Greek word ἐφήμερος, as Fränkel argued, applies to the precarious and variable nature of human life, as well as to man’s limited understanding of time beyond the single day which he inhabits.

The paper follows on the first by examining the use of the Greek term ἐφήμερος as a performative act of speech, one that combines elements of exhortation and provocation. It traces a long history of ephemerality being lodged as a complaint, problem, warning or a wake-up call. The word itself literally denotes “lasting for a day” (following Dickie 1976 over Fränkel 1955) and commonly connotes the short-lived nature of human existence and endeavors.

Animals, plants, provisions, pleasures, thoughts, poisons, fevers and much else can, in certain circumstances, be described as ἐφήμερος, but in poetry at least the quintessentially ἐφήμερος thing is the human (cf. Plut. Mor. 1090b). This paper examines the combination of specificity and elusiveness that gives the notion of humanity as ἐφήμερος its particular expressive force. Ἐφήμερος, I argue, acts as a stimulus to thought, and indeed to poetic writing, by posing a question that allows more than one answer: what do we mean when we call humans “day creatures”?