Watches and clocks are not the only things that tell time. Less precisely perhaps but just as surely, any object entropically registers time's impact, time's movement. A stone, a flower petal, a book, a photograph … even the thick leather of a “stiff boot” will soften with time, crack and finally crumble. Try as we might, there simply is no stopping it; for time's story insists on being told. Of course, a face, a body, also show time and its transformations upon their smooth surfaces, the skin as a site of time's inscription, its shadows cast legibly across it. A body thus marks time, measuring its incessant motion, its reality written there for all to read.

In what follows, objects and bodies, even a pair of “stiff boots,” will be theatrically aligned in Samuel Beckett and Marcel Proust's own conjoined stories of time's telling and memory's performance. Often told with the “cruel precision of a camera,” their converging tales of time will be enacted, their images of absence cast upon faces, upon bodies bending, gesturing toward their own disappearance.