PUBLICATIONS PMSS CALENDARS Guide

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 17: PUBLICATIONS PMSS
CALENDARS Guide
1914, 1938, 1940-1978 

1953_calendar_001


TAGS: publications by PMSS, PMSS calendars, fundraising, reflections on the meaning of “time,” links to pages with images of calendars


PUBLICATIONS PMSS Calendars GUIDE

Among the many publications of Pine Mountain Settlement School is an array of calendars. The first calendar, published in 1914, was used as part of the fundraising campaign of the institution. The idea was a simple one that bound the promise of the new school to a future measured by the march of time.

It is not surprising that the sensitive Ethel de Long, co-director of the new settlement school would settle on this instrument of months and weeks and days to measure the School’s progress through time and to aim for its future.

The writer Jorge Luis Borges spoke to the compelling nature of time when in 1946 he commented in his essay A New Refutation of Time (1946, revised 1947)

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

Today time is ever more compelling as new science digs deeply into time and asks us all to reflect on “what makes it tick?” Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time (2017) and James Gleick’s Time Travel (2016) are two more writings among the many that have taken on the challenge of exploring that most elusive and pervasive element of our existence … time.

In their singularity, so to speak, calendars provide a thread that weaves together that elusive time. Calendars are knots in the thread that tie us to past and present. They measure our distance from the past as they measure our journey to our future. The writer Ursula Le Guin made note of the passage of time in this stanza from her short poem Hymn to Time, written just prior to her death in 2018:

Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.

In some ways, calendars are mind traps. They capture the arrows of time from year to year that mark our experiences. But, as James Gleick tells us, those experiences are only in our minds. It is the mind that does the experiencing and it is in the mind that

…we experience most immediately [and our mind] … is subject to the arrow of time. It creates memories as it goes. It models the world and continually compares these models with their predecessors. Whatever consciousness will turn out to be, it is not a moving flashlight illuminating successive slices of the four-dimensional space-time continuum. It is a dynamical system, occurring in time, evolving in time, able to absorb bits of information from the past and process them, and able as well to create anticipation for the future.

Taken as a whole the calendars of Pine Mountain create memories of place and imaginations of futures. The calendars are arrows to past, and to future. And, most importantly, calendars capture in the now, a range of personal viewpoints as each calendar creator and viewer aims their own “arrow of time.”


PUBLICATIONS Calendars: GUIDE 

     1914 PMSS CALENDAR

1938 PMSS CALENDAR

1939 PMSS CALENDAR 

1940 PMSS CALENDAR

1941 PMSS CALENDAR

1942 PMSS CALENDAR

1943 PMSS CALENDAR

1944 PMSS CALENDAR

1945 PMSS CALENDAR

1946 PMSS CALENDAR

1947 PMSS CALENDAR

1948 PMSS CALENDAR

1949 PMSS CALENDAR

1950 PMSS CALENDAR

1951 PMSS CALENDAR

1952 PMSS CALENDAR – “A Year of Song”

1953 PMSS CALENDAR

1954 PMSS CALENDAR

1955 PMSS CALENDAR

1956 PMSS CALENDAR

1957 PMSS CALENDAR

1958 PMSS CALENDAR

1959 PMSS CALENDAR

1960 PMSS CALENDAR

1961 PMSS CALENDAR

1968 PMSS CALENDAR

1969 PMSS CALENDAR

1971 PMSS CALENDAR

1972 PMSS CALENDAR

1977 PMSS CALENDAR

1978 PMSS CALENDAR


See Also:
PUBLICATIONS PMSS CALENDARS Guide