REVIEW: Glass Century by Ross Barkan

There is perhaps no philosopher who made more of an impact on the literature of the 20^th century than Henri Bergson. Though rarely spoken of these days, Bergson’s Creative Evolution was wildly popular upon its publication in 1907, and his speaking tours caused traffic jams in Paris and New York. His influence on European and American novelists—Marcel Proust, Virginia Wolfe, Willa Cather, William Faulkner—can be seen in their explorations of time, memory, and duration (defined by Bergson as “the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.”) Duration manifests itself through memory which brings the past into the present. “It follows us at every instant,” Bergson says, “all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.”