Thanks, tsuwm, yes, that's the quotation in Dickens. Didn't know about 'intercapedo', very interesting. 'Capedo' is said to designate one type of vessel used to hold the entrails in Roman sacrifices (see, for example, 'Manual of classical literature' by Eschenburg and Fiske on Google Books, yay for online references :)). If this line of thinking is followed, it could cautiously be inferred that 'intercapedo' (also translated as 'an intermission') points to that very short mo(ment) of rest and preparation - briefly after the body has been purified (or, rather, the entrails have been purified in preparation for their sacrifice, for it was the entrails that were sacrificed and the actual meat of the body utilized, i.e. consumed, after that, right? or I may be mistaken...) and just before it was sacrificed to the Gods. In other words, the restful interval of intermission between the earthly and heavenly life and the only moment when earthly creatures (men) could gain the benevolence of Gods and, thus, become moral and feel the deified experience of afterlife.
Of course, this is a purely speculative inference, yet, in this sense, it would seem to guide towards a more general meaning of 'intercapedo' and 'a space of time' as the earthly life - in all its impurities and in all endeavours to get rid of them in preparation for the passing into the purer heavenly dwelling. Romans, like the Greeks, then seem to have had an awareness of time that was very morally bound.
The 'space thing' must have occured later - when a conception of time was already imbued with more objectivity, i.e. a connection of time to the physical duration that was observed from men's surroundings (16th century, as OED says?).
Which is what, I suppose, I meant with the above post, BranShea. Time, as you say, is a more or less illusionary concept, a subjective experience and that's a very frustrating thought - hence our man-made devices to elevate it to a fact, to a comforting objectivity like the seeming objectivity of space which lays before us in its varied natural and manly incarnations. If one can impregnate time with and ground it in the indubitable fact of passing, moving space (motion, like the passing frames of cinema), doesn't it become more objective, a certainty, still illusionary, as we realize in the back of our heads, yet very comfortingly so?
Like these Romans, who knew that earthly life was never to be purified well enough to the point of heavenly existence, yet felt comforted by the illusion of closeness between the two lives during the intermission of the sacrifice...
