Guest Editor’s Note for J. T. Fraser Centenary Special Issue: Recalling the Past, Assessing the Present, Predicting the Future

Abstract

I first met Julius Fraser, along with his wife Jane, in late summer 1995. A few weeks prior, my husband, Thomas Weissert, had attended the Ninth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time (held in St. Adèle, Québec), and he had returned home extolling the stimulating interdisciplinary presentations and the collegial atmosphere he had experienced. He had also returned home with a task to bring the ISST online – and with an invitation from Julius and Jane to pay them a visit during our vacation trip to Maine. We were welcomed like old friends, and, by the time we left the next morning, Julius had thrust a book on me and made me promise that I would review it for the “Time’s Books” column in Time’s News, the aperiodic newsletter for the society that Julius had initiated in 1974.1 Although he was ever the gracious host, Julius was always engaged in forwarding the work of the ISST. Over the years, our family would return many times to the Fraser home, a modest ranch-house, situated on the felicitously named Winding Lane West in Westport, Connecticut. It was something of an intellectual hub, where throughout the years the Frasers hosted a variety of scholars from a variety of disciplines. For over a decade, the Frasers also hosted the ISST Council, converting the living room into a meeting room by the addition of kitchen chairs and dining-room chairs to accommodate all the members. The study, however, served as the true center of the intellectual ferment – the hub of the hub, if you will. It was lined on three sides with bookshelves (with one bottom row filled with books that Jane had accumulated over her years as a second-grade teacher and that delighted small guests). The bookshelves contained multitudes of time-centric tomes, of course, but also an eclectic assortment of various books that appealed to Julius’s polymathic mind – collections of Borges’s fictions, Synge and Griffeth’s Principles of