Timely/Untimely: The Rhythm of Things and the Time of Life Felix Ó Murchadha (National University of Ireland, Galway) Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Fall 2018), pp. 178- 200 This article presents an understanding of time and temporality as adverbial. In normal discourse we speak of time as a condition of action, thought, and events: to intervene in a timely fashion, to live anachronistically or to be before her time. Adverbially understood, time is experienced in terms of an oscillation between the timely and the untimely. Crucial to this is rhythm, and access to time so understood is acoustic rather than visual. We hear time, we do not see it, or if we do see time we do so only through its rhythmic, acoustic, and indeed musical structure. Discussing the Book of Ecclesiastes, philosophers such as Nancy and Lefebvre, as well as music theorists, this article articulates the different rhythms of the timely/untimely. It shows time as a living rhythm between the “energy of beginnings” and mechanicity. Cet article présente une conception du temps comme adverbiale. Dans le discours normal, nous parlons du temps comme condition d'action, de pensée et d'événements: intervenir en temps opportun, vivre anachroniquement ou être avant son temps. Le temps adverbialement conçu est vécu en termes d'oscillation entre le temps opportun et le temps inopportun. Le rythme est crucial pour de telles relations et l'accès au temps ainsi conçu est plutôt acoustique que visuel. Nous entendons le temps, nous ne le voyons pas, ou, si en effet nous voyons le temps, ce n’est que de part sa structure rythmique, acoustique, et même musicale. Cet article énonce les différents rythmes de l’opportun et inopportun en traitant du Livre de l'Ecclésiaste et des philosophes tels que Nancy et Lefebvre ainsi qu’ à des théoriciens de la musique. Il montre le temps comme un rythme vivant entre «l'énergie des débuts» et la mécanicité. Time is both ubiquitous and elusive. The structure of human experience is temporal. Action and thought, entities and places are all temporally constituted, yet we find great difficulty in saying what time is. Thinking time as something, as an object of some sort, or even as a container in which things are, leads us to paradoxes about time. This is not surprising as we live time not as an object or a thing or even as a container, not as anything designated by a noun, but rather as that which is constitutive of an action, an occurrence, a state of being: time as adverb. In normal discourse we speak of time not as a thing, but as a condition of action, thought, and events: to intervene in a timely fashion, to be in time with one another, to live anachronistically or (conversely) in a manner which is prescient, to speak prophetically. Adverbially understood, time is experienced in terms of an oscillation between the timely and the untimely. That is to say, time is experienced primordially as movement and the manner of being in relation to movement. Time understood adverbially is that quality of an action which