More haste less speed: Cognition,creativity,and culture in temporal paradox

Experiencing time: Metaphor, blending, and the meaning of speed

Time is typically structured in terms of space (“back in the past,” “Monday is approaching”) or of other conceptual domains with a significant perceptual component, such as our interactions with substances or objects (“little time left,” “give me a minute”). In particular, the structuring of time using our knowledge of motion and relative distance (e.g., “we are approaching the deadline”/“the deadline is approaching”) has been so extensively studied that it has become a sort of model system of choice for linguistic and psychological tests of metaphorical connections between concepts (Casasanto, 2009). There is extensive experimental evidence that shows how manipulations of the way people think about space affect their reasoning about time. ¹ Furthermore, studies with subjects from different cultures show that, although the specifics of the spatial mappings can differ considerably from language to language, the projection between space and time can be observed in practically all languages examined, as well as in behavioral tests with nonverbal tasks. ²

Over the last decades, psycholinguistic and cognitive linguistic research has presented the spatialization of time as major evidence supporting the claim that abstract concepts are regularly understood in terms of more concrete domains, ³ along the lines proposed by conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff, 2008; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). However, growing empirical evidence suggests that the influence is not exclusively unidirectional—only from space toward time and not vice versa—in time conceptualization and that the mappings between space and time are complex. This is most apparently exposed by creative uses such as the poetic. ⁴ Various aspects of literary, journalistic, or graphic expressions have been analyzed to show that the complexity of these mappings require more than a mere transfer from spatial to temporal knowledge, and that the goal-oriented manipulation of certain features of this “conceptual recipe,” such as orientation or the shape of the path, can create meaningful pragmatic and aesthetic effects (Coulson and Pagán Cánovas, 2013; Pagán Cánovas and Jensen, 2013; Pagán Cánovas and Piata, 2018).

The use of speed in metaphorical time expressions is a clear example of how a spatial parameter (speed) allegedly imported from the source of the metaphor (our knowledge about motion along a path), is manipulated to create emergent meanings with an affective or social value, such as time running very slow when we are expecting to meet a person that we love, or events (e.g., a deadline) approaching very fast when they carry negative consequences or impending risks. Exclusively for the specific purposes of time conceptualization, the speed of an object or of an experiencer moving along a path is made dependent on the observer’s emotional or social attitudes. These meanings are emergent, insofar as these properties of speed are absent from any of the components or terms of the metaphor (space and time, or motion along a path and duration), and therefore cannot have been imported directly. Our knowledge about motion tells us that we cannot influence the speed of independently moving objects with our feelings or attitudes. The planet rotating, raindrops falling on us, people walking around us, or birds flying over our heads will not vary their speed because we feel in a certain way, and we would never expect them to do so.

We also have the conventional conception of objective time, independent from individual experience, as a uniform magnitude measured in terms of universal events, such as days or hours, which cannot vary in their duration. The conceptualization of objective time requires invariable speed. That is why, conventionally, we measure time in terms of uniform motion (as in a clock or a sundial). Naturally, it is essential for measurement that the value of all these units may never become longer or shorter depending on the circumstances. An hour is always 60 minutes, equivalent to a stable, recurrent event of uniform motion across the full dial of the clock or to an analogous event in any other mechanism at hand.

However, when we are talking about our subjective time experience, hours can drag their feet or fly by; time goes by fast or slow depending on our emotions toward durations or events, or on our ideas about the social and individual value of time: “There are calendars and clocks to measure time, but that means little because we all know that a single hour can seem like an eternity, but it can also pass in the blink of an eye—depending on what we experience in this hour. Because time is life. And life resides in our hearts” (Michael Ende, Momo, Chapter 6). ⁵ Rather than merely about time, the case study for the present article, Michael Ende’s novel Momo, just like so many other literary works, is interested in the human experience of temporality, in the moral and social implications of people’s choices in their use of time, in how life is lived. As a result, the metaphor for speed and subjective duration is repeatedly used throughout the book.

Subjective time speed does not strike the reader as particularly poetic or unusual. However, it is not easily explained as the result of a metaphorical projection from our spatial knowledge. Nothing in our experience of motion suggests that our feelings could affect the speed of independently moving objects. And, of course, all our knowledge about time measurement tells us that time “flows” at invariable speed and that “objective” time units (days, hours, minutes) are universal events that have always exactly the same duration, which is also independent from the emotions of the observer, and, in fact, from everything else. So where does subjective time speed come from?

Since it cannot be explained as the result of direct transfer from spatial to temporal knowledge, subjective time speed requires a more complex framework, suitable for dealing with meanings and inferences that are constructed ad-hoc, for the particular cognitive and discursive purposes at hand (Fauconnier and Turner, 2008). An alternative proposal seeking to account for such phenomena has come from blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002; Turner, 2014). The blending or conceptual integration framework postulates that mappings between concepts require one or more hybrid mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1985, 1997), mental configurations for local purposes of thought or action, where selected elements create meanings and relations independently of the concepts from which those elements were borrowed. Therefore, rather than direct transfer from a concrete to an abstract domain (), blending theory proposes selected projection to a blend (). In the case of time-space projections, the blending account proposes an intricate and rather flexible conceptual template (Fauconnier and Turner, 2008), which could be summarized as follows.

Across cultures, perhaps universally, human beings easily build and apply an abstract template for blending generic event structure with a more specific event of motion from A to B. This mental pattern is independent from any concept of time as such. The blend of spatial and generic events allows us to conceptualize nonspatial events, and especially durations, as spatial regions, objects, trajectories, or events of motion. These spatialized events can now be divided into “smaller” parts, despite being actually sizeless and boundless (“The second half of the concert was better than the first”), or have starting, intermediate, and end points along a path that the experiencers go through (“We slept through the whole seminar,” “I’m in the middle of a lecture,” “Is he ever going to get to the end of his speech?”) or that the events themselves go through (“The concert is getting near the end,” “The countdown cracks into its second half …”).

Alongside this template, human societies can also construct a different pattern, which allows us to have time and time measures as cultural representations of what we could call objective time, that is, the idea of time as a reality independent of any particular experience, observer, or event. This conceptualization has vast cultural and social implications, which have been accentuated by the increasingly higher status of objective time in modern societies (Adam, 2006). Objective time measures result from blending the observation of recurrent events in nature, such as the sun rising and setting, with a material (or immaterial) mechanism for registering and measuring those regularities: a sundial, observation of shadow-length, the recurrence of seasons, and so forth. The compression of any of these cyclic repetitions (the daily cycle into the day, the yearly cycle into the year) renders universal events, which take place everywhere at the same time, are shared by all experiencers, and can be quantified: a day, an hour, a week … .

No motion or distance, or any other spatial properties beyond the ones actually perceived in the natural regularities or on the measuring devices, are needed for constructing objective time or universal time measures. We can, for example, possess temporal concepts connected to duration or sequence independently of any spatial metaphor. This allows us to think of some events as taking less time than others, or of some events as being expected to happen previously to or later than others. Different events (a lecture, a race, a film, a song, breakfast on different occasions) have different durations, and so do the different time measures (hours, minutes, seconds). Winter can be expected to happen after autumn and Monday after Sunday; when it gets dark it is time for children to go to bed. Cyclic repetitions do not need to be conceived as motion in order to be understood. Neither children nor adults need to frame the bed-time sequence of events as motion or arrival. They could, but they do not need to, and very young children will surely have difficulties understanding that nighttime has arrived (How? From where?), while they will easily understand that it being dark outside means they must go to bed—and will complain if sent to bed before dark, even at a very young age when they are certainly unable to frame nonspatial events as motion. We can also have hours, days, months, seasons … without these units or ourselves necessarily moving along a path. We do not need a motion metaphor to say that the spring has begun or that it is three o’clock. Although spatialization plays an important role in measuring time (and practically everything else) the metaphorical value of motion in spatialized time can be separated from objective time. Time in motion or experiencers moving along time serve representational or expressive goals that are not primarily connected with time measurement. Temporal motion also requires further conceptual integrations.

Therefore, the blending template for spatialized events (event structure + A→B motion/distance) and the blending template for universal time measures (natural cycles + mechanisms for their observation) are independent conceptual constructs. But they are also extremely suitable for further blending between themselves. Time measures are events after all, and setting them into motion or disposing them along a path opens a variety of expressive opportunities. So human cognition easily and productively integrates these two patterns into a further blend (Fauconnier and Turner, 2008). In this further blend—which needs to be built upon the other two—we finally have spatialized time: experiencers can move or situate along time or with respect to time units or temporal landmarks (“We are getting closer to Friday,” “We are still very far from the spring,” “Is it possible to travel through time?”) and vice versa (“The hour went by,” “Your birthday is not even close yet,” “Time passes for all of us”). Without the integration of spatialized events and universal time measures, this would not be possible. ⁶

It is important to note that this pattern is optional, especially when it comes to thinking about time in itself, as an objective reality separate from experience. If spatialized time is used, if its possibilities for motion, speed, and other features are deployed, it is because of the pattern’s great potential to create a variety of interesting meanings, beyond what can be offered by spatialized events and universal-objective time measurement separately. Unlike subjective time experience, universal time measures do not need to be conceived in terms of motion (“It is one o’clock,” “April has thirty days”). To tell the time in a mechanism, time or hours or minutes do not need to pass, and we observers do not need to pass by anything either: we simply need to know that the motion intervals of the hands along the subdivisions of the dial, or of the sand or water falling from one location to another, are always the same, and that we can therefore count them, add them or divide them to make them objectively equivalent to various durations. The hands of the clock do move and we measure that movement to make it equivalent to durations, but time itself does not need to move—or we through time—for us to be able to measure it. Traditionally—but not necessarily: for example, in a digital watch—universal time measures do result from the observation of motion in a mechanism, such as a clock or a sundial, but there speed is not relevant for constructing any further meanings, because it is necessarily uniform—otherwise the time measures would not be objective.

A thunderstorm or the reading of a novel, or any other event that is not fixed, cyclic, or universal, can indeed be framed as “going” fast or slow, but, unless an equivalence in objective time has been previously established—for example, a lecture that necessarily takes one hour—more or less speed in these expressions means an actually shorter or longer duration in objective time. A battle that went by fast is, in principle, one that was fought in a comparatively short time—and a phrase such as a quick battle typically refers to that meaning of brevity. On the other hand, an hour that went by fast must still have lasted 60 minutes. The meaning here is that this duration was less apparent than usual to our subjective perception. Regarding time experience, a quick hour does not typically mean the same as a quick battle. Thus in the blending template for spatialized time—which combines spatialized events and universal time units—, subjective time perception, as a separated construct from objective time, can be expressed by manipulating the speed of time itself. This would violate the intrinsic working of any time measuring mechanism, where speed needs to be uniform. Time can go faster or slower in our experience. The hands of the clock cannot.

This complexity points at something more than mere transfer from our knowledge of motion to our concepts of time. Speed and motion require time. Duration is indeed inseparable from any perception of motion or speed, and therefore time and space are intertwined even in our most primary perceptual experiences. However, speed and motion behave in particular ways, different from their functioning in any other setting, when we are using them to talk and think about temporal meanings. Successive steps of integration, blended concepts, and goal-oriented manipulation of the imported elements offer a better explanation than the mere space-to-time metaphor, that is, the direct transfer of concrete or perceptual knowledge to an abstract concept of time. The conceptual integration template renders subjective time speed as one of its possible emergent meanings, and its productivity in relation with rhetorical goals has made it conventional. At the same time, there is enough flexibility in the mental network to allow for further goal-oriented developments, suitable for creating poetic effects such as the ones I will now examine. These creative manipulations further expose the intricate and flexible nature of the mappings between time and space and their selective integrations in meaning construction.

Momo by Michael Ende

Momo (1973) is a short novel by Michael Ende, his most popular work next to The Neverending Story (1979). Momo has been very successful among both children and adults. Very wide audiences have made sense of its symbolism about time, translated into many languages and adapted into film (1986, with John Houston as Professor Hora), opera, theatre, animated cartoons, or dramatized readings in radio and audiobook format.

Momo is an orphan of unknown origin that lives in the ruins of an ancient amphitheater. She is loved by all her neighbors because of her imagination, optimism, and ability to listen to everyone’s problems. One day, a mysterious gang of gray men starts taking hold of the city and of everyone’s lives. They unceasingly smoke gray cigars. The men in gray exploit people’s fears. They persuade everyone of saving their minutes, hours, days … on an interest-paying bank account, so that they can use the time saved in the future. But in fact the men in gray steal this time from its owners, making their lives shorter and miserable. Momo discovers the truth and the men in gray go after her. A mysterious tortoise named Cassiopeia appears to help Momo, taking her to Nowhere House, where Professor Minutus Secundus Hora controls the production of all time. Hora sends each person her assigned portion of time in the form of hour-lilies, which blossom and wilt in one hour. It is those flowers that the men in gray are stealing from their owners. They turn their petals into the cigars they live on.

Momo returns and tries to spread the truth, but the men in gray isolate her from her friends and press her to take them to Nowhere House, so that they can take hold of the whole time supply in the world. When Cassiopeia comes back to help Momo, the men in gray follow them and besiege Professor Hora’s palace, polluting the flow of time with the smoke from their cigars. Hora then cuts the flow of time by going to sleep, causing a panic among the men in gray, who fear that there will soon be no time left for them to live on. The men in gray then retreat to their time bank and fight for the possession of their own remaining supplies of time. Before he goes to sleep, Hora had given Momo an hour-lily, which grants her one hour to act. She must use it to go to the bank of the men in gray and release the stolen flowers. When Momo accomplishes this, all the stolen hour-lilies—as well as the joy of living—return to their legitimate owners. Hora wakes up and the flow of time from Nowhere House is restored.

More haste less speed

This is the title of chapter 10, in which Cassiopeia, the tortoise, appears in the story and leads Momo to Nowhere House for her first visit. The proverb in the title is widespread, for example, Spanish vísteme despacio, que tengo prisa, “dress me up slowly: I am in a hurry.” The generic meaning is that slowing down parts of a process to perform them more effectively helps avoid mistakes and delays, thus speeding up the process as a whole. And vice versa. It is a very old idea. For example, in the second century AD, Suetonius (Aug. 25.4.1) tells us that Augustus hated rashness in his leaders and that among his mottos was the—already old by Augustus’ time, around year 0—Greek saying σπεῦδε βραδέως, festina lente in Latin, which means “make haste slowly.”

However, Momo’s readers soon find that Cassiopeia takes this conventional oxymoron to a further level:

Momo wunderte sich, wie schnell sie hier vorankamen, obgleich die Schildkröte eher noch langsamer ging als bisher. (…)

A tortoise is indeed appropriate for symbolizing the more-haste-less-speed philosophy. In the folk personification, tortoises are not merely slow: they “take their time” because they are old, and often wise. They are also primitive, belonging to a remote past—both in folklore and in evolutionary biology. Professor Hora describes Cassiopeia as “a creature from beyond the frontiers of time” (chapter 19), carrying her own time supply inside her. These ideas combine with the universal pattern for personifying animals and assigning them intentionality. Cassiopeia constitutes a special case of the talking animal that often results from such personifications. She does not speak; instead, she “writes” her thoughts as words that appear and vanish on her shell. Since Momo cannot read very well, it takes her some time to decipher the messages on the tortoise’s shell. Therefore, communicating with Cassiopeia requires more attention than your usual conversation. This slows down communication as well as the narrative pace, increasing the perceived duration for the reader, as well as for Momo. The meticulous, unhurried interaction between both characters is not even affected by situations of great danger. When chased by hordes of men in gray, Cassiopeia still talks and walks at the same pace.

Cassiopeia’s slowness is also enhanced by the contrast with her cultural role models. Her mission is to bring Momo to Nowhere House, where Professor Hora dwells. She is a messenger and a guide, an intermediary between two worlds. In fiction, mythology or religion, such characters are typically fast. Think of Hermes, Iris, angels, fairies, or even Tinker Bell. They are all swift, slender, and winged. Even entirely human messengers, who lack divine powers and the capacity for mediating between worlds, typically ride powerful horses or speedy vehicles, or at least run fast. Compared to them, Cassiopeia is the anti-messenger, precisely because she is meant to serve the poetic goals of this particular story. Her purpose is crucial to understand how she travels in time and space. But even if we understand that Cassiopeia is a very particular messenger, we find it paradoxical that in her journey slow and fast mean exactly their opposites. How is this meaning constructed?

The basis is provided by the template for spatialized time, integrating, as we saw, spatialized duration (event structure + A→B motion/distance) and universal time measures (natural cycles + mechanisms for their observation). In this particular case, the spatialized duration corresponds to an event that is already one of motion along a path: Momo and Cassiopeia’s journey, with the men in gray in pursuit. The duration of this first motion event can itself be conceptualized in terms of motion and relative distance. We can go through a journey just like we go through a lecture, and being in the middle of the journey can mean that we have reached half of its duration, without necessarily having covered half of the actual distance, for speed along a path is rarely uniform. No independent concept of time is required in a case like this. We merely blend an event—which in this case happens to be a journey—with A→B motion, in order to conceptualize its duration in spatial terms.

If we then blend this spatialized duration with time and time units, the motion event acquires two speeds: objective and subjective, physical and temporal. When we are traveling, we can say “The journey passed very slowly.” This refers to how we perceived the duration of the journey as a stretch of time. This duration is often independent from the actual speed of the motion: we may be traveling very fast but be expecting the arrival with impatience and therefore feel that the journey is slow. It is possible to feel that time flies when we are walking, and that time is going slowly when we are flying at several hundred miles an hour. We can feel that we are passing slowly through an event, despite being aware that there is high-speed motion taking place in this same event. This gives us subjective time speed alongside actual motion. The blend allows us to have both meanings simultaneously.

But there is still something else to this particular journey. Momo and Cassiopeia are traveling along a mysterious path that is only known by Cassiopeia. The destination is a place beyond time and space where Momo will gain deep and important new knowledge. This suggests that the Momo–Cassiopeia journey is already a blend in which traveling maps onto a spiritual experience. In this spiritual-journey blend, arrival to the destination is connected to personal change or learning. This conceptual template is also quite conventional: “the path of wisdom,” “the road to salvation,” and so many other examples. As conceptual metaphor research has repeatedly shown, journeys are appropriate for framing life, love, and many other biographical meanings (Forceville, 2006). Just like any other process, the learning or personal transformation story does not in itself have the structure of a journey. It can easily be integrated with one, as in this case, but it can also be understood in its own terms (“Momo gradually learns about the true nature of time”), or it can be blended with a different conceptual frame, such as receiving (Momo acquires deep wisdom about time). Conceiving Momo’s learning process as a journey is a choice, and one that happens to be appropriate for the goal of transcending time and space.

This is a recurrent pattern as well. In numerous folktales and myths, traveling from “this world” to “the other world” requires getting lost in a mysterious path that has a symbolic duration. As early as Homer, which is himself the culmination of a millenary oral tradition, Odysseus gets lost for nine days—a magical number—every time he shifts between the world of men and the islands inhabited by cyclops, nymphs, or deities. This blended journey is a path toward knowledge of a kind that cannot be acquired otherwise, and magic formulas such as the 9 days of wandering suggest that normal temporal relations are also modified or suspended. When the hero comes back, the actual amount of time that has elapsed often exceeds the perception of that duration. This also happens in Momo. When she is back from Nowhere House, Momo discovers that a whole year has passed in the world, although it felt like one single day for her.

And yet, none of this explains how Cassiopeia deals with speed. Even within this “getting-lost-in-time” pattern, a fast journey to wisdom or to the Isle of Calypso does not take you there later than a slow journey. Then where does Cassiopeia’s speed come from? Does it result from projecting the abstract meaning of More haste less speed onto the spiritual journey?

It does not. The property “slowing down your pace increases your speed” is not available from More haste less speed either. Whether there is motion or not, what matters to the overall duration of any process is not to perform its tasks slowly, but rather to perform them at the maximum speed compatible with efficiency. Speed and efficiency are not inversely proportional but competing. We are all well aware of this. Take a motion example of More haste less speed. Driving your car too fast may result in an accident, or in making mistakes along the way, which will ultimately delay your arrival. But nobody infers that the slower you travel, the faster you will move and the sooner you will reach your destination. If you can drive safely and following the right itinerary at, say, 50 mph, we all agree that, all things being equal, traveling at 25 mph will not get you there earlier, but later. Again, if you get off your car and start walking at 2 mph, you are expected to travel more slowly and arrive much later.

Just like in the car example, in the Momo and Cassiopeia journey, we have two events of motion: the event of traveling and the metaphorical time motion, which emerges in the blend by fusing spatialized duration with time measures as universal events. This means that Momo and Cassiopeia travel and, independently, time moves—or people move through time. It also means that we now have two speeds: the speed of the journey and the speed of time—or of people’s passage through time. Separately, these two motion events do not render the specific meaning of Cassiopeia’s speed. Considering the two speeds independently, Momo can feel that they are traveling fast and that time is passing fast too, but she could never connect those perceptions to the actual slowness of motion.

What happens here is that this subjective time motion becomes further integrated with the pattern of the spiritual journey. By fusing the two journeys (the motion along a temporal path and the gradual progress toward wisdom) we can have a motion event that is at the same time spatial, metaphorical, and temporal, with a destination (Nowhere House) that is three things in one: an actual or imaginary place where the motion ends, a moment in the future in which the journey (the event, its duration) ends, and a state of consciousness that implies that a certain wisdom has been achieved. Since the journey has now become subjective time motion, the traveler’s attitude and emotions directly affect his/her own speed and progress. Since the journey also retains its spiritual goal imported from the spiritual journey input, the values of More haste less speed can be incorporated into the attitude of the travelers toward the motion itself. Going faster means going slower, and vice versa, because the destination where the travelers are heading is wisdom, illumination, and not just a point in space or a moment in time. The knowledge that Momo and Cassiopeia are seeking can only be achieved through careful reflection and deep human feeling, through slowness and spiritual quality as opposed to hastiness and materialism. Being slow means being wiser, and Cassiopeia has such a deep understanding of the nature of time that by traveling her way one gets to that wisdom faster than by any other means. With their racing and sprinting, the hasty, materialist men in gray get it all wrong: that is not the right way to go where the tortoise is going.

The blend is designed for a very specific purpose, and cannot be accounted for without taking into account the particular meaning sought in this particular context, alongside its ad-hoc fusion of various elements into a novel, unusual—perhaps unprecedented—combination. At the same time, all the building blocks, the inputs for event navigation or time measurement as well as the connections between them, are extremely conventional, perhaps universal across societies above a certain threshold of complexity. The resulting paradox feels very exotic because it violates our knowledge of motion and event structure. This conceptual clash leads us to assign a moral value to the different speeds and attitudes of the travelers. Momo and Cassiopeia travel faster than the men in gray simply because they have different attitudes and goals, and this journey is all about attitudes and goals, about how life is lived and how time is conceived. A moral value for speed is unavailable from our experience of space, time, motion, or duration. It can only emerge within a blend that creatively reuses the conventional cognitive recipes for further purposes.

Once these connections are teased out, the meaning is not so mysterious. However, why does the narrative still feel so exotic? The detailed enaction of a blend hinders the unpacking of the network and the retrieval of the connections between the conceptual structures involved. As we strive to draw metaphorical inferences about time and vital attitudes, we are faced with a scene that looks more and more autonomous. Streets and buildings flash by Momo and Cassiopeia as they walk ever slower. Meanwhile, the men in gray are racing to no use. For them, the path turns into a conveyor belt running in the opposite direction at almost exactly their same speed. This means that time can travel toward them—and they through time—at tremendous speed, but they will remain stuck in the path to wisdom. It is not so easy to draw all those inferences while processing this powerful image, inserted in a vivid scene with a very “real” chase going on. Developing an autonomous blended simulation and keeping strong connections to the inputs are competing optimality principles of blending (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002: 309–352). In this case, autonomy is privileged, and that makes the reader regard the narrative as powerful and loaded with affect, while the inferences about its parabolic meaning seem a bit blurry.

Momo’s second journey to Nowhere House is coherent with the blending pattern of the first visit. She is now depressed because her friends have failed her. Her attitude has changed. She fears that the journey is going to take forever this time, and insists on carrying Cassiopeia. “THE WAY’S INSIDE ME,” the tortoise replies. In fact, for Momo, who has had a hard time sticking to the wisdom she got from Hora, it does feel like it is taking very long this time. Although the second journey is not supposed to be longer than the first, in this second trip Momo feels exhausted, as if they were never going to get there. Her subjective time experience competes with the paradoxical speed of Cassiopeia’s journey to wisdom. After having suffered boredom and solitude, now slow for Momo is no longer Cassiopeia’s slow, but rather the conventional, negative slowness in subjective time experience. This is what allows the men in gray to follow the travelers effectively this time, and then to besiege Nowhere House and shroud it in a cloud of smoke from their cigars, polluting the outgoing time. What we have here is two quite intricate time blends competing hand in hand, within the same narrative. Once more, the result is a powerful representation and a set of inferences that require some effort. Shifting from one blending pattern to the other is not difficult because they both build on entrenched mapping and integration structures: speed for subjective time perception within the spatialized time conceptual network, and its integration—or not—with the “path-to-wisdom” attitude.

Halting time

Naturally, the Cassiopeia blend only applies when you are trying to reach Nowhere House. Just like any other blending template, it can be switched off or tweaked to suit a change in context and goals, because it is not an ontological or fixed projection, but a recipe with generic indications to perform mappings and integrations connected to a range of purposes in thought and communication. Generic templates for conceptual integration are not learned in a sociocultural vacuum; instead, they are interiorized and rehearsed through an instance-based process. The templates always come accompanied by “good practices,” by a certain know-how about the right ways to apply them to different contexts. Near the end of the book, Momo and Cassiopeia embark on a very different journey. To prevent the men in gray from poisoning the time supply being sent to humankind, Professor Hora decides to stop time altogether. Before doing that, Hora gives Momo one hour—in the shape of an hour-lily—to release the hour-lilies stolen by the men in gray, which are locked up in their time bank. “More haste less speed no longer applied, of course, now that time was at a standstill” (chapter 20), so Cassiopeia literally urges Momo not to waste time, although there is “actually” no time left to be wasted. But Cassiopeia is here referring to the precious hour-lily that Hora has given them, which lasts exactly 1 hour. So Momo grabs the tortoise and runs as fast as she can.

Cassiopeia cannot function as a guide in this journey, because it bears no connection with the blend of spiritual journey + motion through time. Instead, this is merely an action that needs to be performed in no more than 60 minutes, within the objective duration of an hour. The clock measuring time, which used to mean little (see our first quotation), means everything now. Quite effortlessly, the narrative switches the organizing frame of the blend, now privileging the cyclic measuring mechanism over event structure or motion. This is not an unusual phenomenon: shifting frames to adjust the blend to communicative or representational goals is a frequent procedure in conceptual integration, indispensable for humor, irony, and many other discursive practices (Coulson, 2001). As a result of this shift, Momo and Cassiopeia drop the spiritual-journey frame and move to the objective-time version of the blending template. Therefore, time now moves at a regular speed, and the hour-lily, with its petals falling at regular intervals, is used as a material anchor to ground conceptual relations directly on perceptual relations (Hutchins, 2005). The flower’s metaphorical connotations related to the experience of life as beautiful, ephemeral, individual, irretrievable, are thus downplayed. For this episode, the narrator is more interested in the anchoring properties of the hour-lily, in making it function as an hourglass or a clock. Momo needs to accomplish her mission before the last petal falls.

Momo’s ending is a node where the story’s most significant time blends converge, combining both conventional and more creative, ad-hoc views of time. By going to sleep, Hora has cut time supply. Only Momo (she has an hour-lily), Cassiopeia (she carries her own time supply), and the men in gray (with their cigars from the hour-lily petals) have time. For the rest of the world, time has stopped. What is special here? Time halting is indeed a paradox, but it is perfectly conventional. However, the conventional uses of the time-halting metaphor refer to subjective time experience. In the blend with subjective time speed, we feel as if time had stopped, but we also keep the link to the mechanic time cycle, which cannot cease. As it often happens in blending, we can have both configurations simultaneously. Two people in love can say that time stops when they look at each other’s eyes, although they know that the clock keeps on running.

Quite differently, in Momo’s ending, as in other fictions, cartoons, and so forth, objective time does stop. Hora stops it in the way one pauses a video clip. The clock is no longer running now. This is objective time experience, with time moving at regular, invariable speed. Ende simply takes advantage of the fact that, in our experience, regular motion can be stopped just like any other kind of motion. In the blend there is a particular fusion: stopping the measuring mechanism (the clocks in Nowhere House) means stopping what is being measured, time itself. The meaning emerging from this configuration clashes with the conceptual structure of the cyclic measuring mechanism, as well as with our experience of time as a continuum. This carries strong emotional implications: everything is over; the world’s terrible fate is to remain forever at a standstill, unless Momo accomplishes her mission. This is a novel situation, extremely exotic and only valid within this narrative, but also perfectly coherent and meaningful for the story being told. Once more, we see how blending opportunistically adapts entrenched—but necessarily flexible—templates to suit specific purposes in particular contexts, which have often themselves been constructed through previous blending. It is the time blends used throughout the story that make this time halting possible in the final chapter. To make sense of it, we do not only need to know the structure and pragmatics of the generic templates, but also the specific instantiations and modifications of these templates proposed by Momo until this point of the narrative.

Another blending template for time, the one that integrates it with commodities and their supply, facilitates this final halting-time scene (Pagán Cánovas and Teuscher, 2012). The world is not merely stopping; it is stopping like a machine that has run out of fuel. Hora is not sending time from Nowhere House anymore. This also allows for creating the privileges that Momo, Cassiopeia and the men in gray enjoy at this point of the story. Since they have their own time supplies, they can move and take part in events. The objective-time measuring mechanism still applies to them. Until the hour-lilies are released by Momo, and time resumes its flow, there is a very particular coexistence of two mental simulations. One of them is the world where everything has stopped: this world does not merely remain at a standstill for an hour, in the way Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom does for a hundred years. Instead, objective time has really ceased, everywhere. When time supply is restored, everything will resume motion and no time will have elapsed. The other world, in which Momo, Cassiopeia and the men in gray perform their actions, has time as a commodity that can be owned and spent, as well as motion through time and space. In the blend integrating both worlds, the characters who own some time can spend it, and thus move and participate in events, interacting with the timeless world. This interaction produces strong clashes: the gray men cannot start their cars; chasing them, Momo must be careful not to get hurt with some feather suspended in the air.

These are emergent properties that can only result from the interaction of both worlds in a new blend, where opportunities for novel, strong affective implications are provided. For example, Momo tries to talk with her friend Beppo, who has stopped moving like everything else, thus giving us one of the most emotional moments in the story. When Momo finally sets the hour-lilies free and with that restores time to the world, the blend dissolves and with it the paradox, but strong inferences about the meaning of time can ensue. It is now up to the reader to spend more time brooding over them.

Blending, creativity, and the poetics of time

When we look closely at such rich examples of the poetics of time, we find that they provide evidence supporting the complexity and flexibility of the mappings between time and other concepts. We have seen how, by taking some of these connections to their limits, time speed in Momo exposes the constraints and opportunities of the mental architectures for constructing the meaning of time. The core rules of the conventional patterns need to be taken into account if the final product is to make any sense. Not anything goes. But there is also ample room for rethinking the connections, for tweaking certain parts of the blends they give rise to, for further reblending to achieve novel meanings and effects. The procedure works because both the time-space integration templates and the cognitive operations that gave rise to them are shared. This has made it possible for many million readers, most of them children, to perform intricate mappings between events, motion, natural cycles, or measures, in order to make sense of the strong conceptual clashes provoked by temporal paradoxes such as Cassiopeia’s More haste less speed.

Research on conceptual metaphor has been right in showing that poetic imagery and symbols rely on conventional, deeply entrenched conceptual templates that combine the principles of human cognition with cultural particulars. It is also true that these entrenched knowledge structures only need slight modifications to give rise to novel meanings (Lakoff and Turner, 1989). However, the metaphor model fails to reveal the full complexity of the mental operations: the true intricacy of the mappings, which present a network rather than a transfer structure, including successive blending steps; the fact that the conceptual projections are to a great extent goal-oriented and driven by contextual factors; the integrative and opportunistic nature of these projections, which allows them to blend and reblend various elements until the effect sought is achieved—or failed to achieve, resulting in an inappropriate blend.

The network model of blending theory can provide crucial insights into the goal-driven processes for the mapping and integration of concepts, into the complex nature of the templates connecting mental structures, and into the relation between cultural-cognitive patterns, creativity, and context. For this, it is necessary to focus not only on the cognitive operations of mapping and blending but also on the templates that arise from them and on the know-how that comes with these templates, which are always geared toward purposeful usage in context. Literary texts manipulate those templates to create powerful pragmatic and poetic effects, and they do it by profiting from—rather than by going against—the template’s usage rules and the governing and optimality principles of blending.

But for that blending theory still needs great refinement, both theoretical and empirical. We need a theory of generic templates, which we do not really have right now. We also need many more data about usage: what gets integrated with what, how the patterns are instantiated and manipulated in connection with contexts and goals, how aesthetic, pragmatic, or other type of communicative effects are produced by the use of the templates in context. This requires that qualitative analyses such as the one provided here be combined with large-scale comparisons between examples of different literary traditions, as well as between poetic and nonpoetic expressions. The representation of time provides an exciting material for this research, given the seemingly universal nature of many aspects in the conceptual patterning of time and temporality, the high frequency of time expressions in both everyday language and literary works, the long career of time-related mappings as a case study in psychology and linguistics, and the way these conceptual templates show the interplay between relatively narrow constraints and creative developments linked to aesthetic, rhetorical, and affective purposes.