Blog Archive

Monday, 24 April 2017



Being in motion in a train is paradigmatic of all your experience in time. If you look through the window the near landscape goes by quickly while the distant landscape changes slowly. If you turn your eyes back to the carriage in which you are sitting you appear to be stationary, but this is only relative to what is moving with you. Your internal structure of retentions and protentions is homomorphic on every scale, you can think in terms of your departure from one station and arrival at your destination at another - where you'll leave the train together with some of your fellow passengers, but others will remain on board and a whistle will sound and they'll recede into the distance; inside the carriage someone else will have taken your seat - but you can also think in terms of the larger journey of which this is one part, of the years of your life, past and future landmarks and stages, your birth and your death; or in terms of smaller units: being between stations, being between two pages of your book, between breaths, heartbeats etc. Always the possibility of looking forward and looking backward, but what you look at keeps changing. The objective you think of as the moment now seems to evaporate and be built up afresh as you gaze into it, a two-faced moment crumbling away on one face and freshly accumulating on the other - but this could represent the moment falling away into the past and renewed from the future, or else the future itself melting away while the past accumulates. The structure is always the same and you are always the same, as if stationary, but the internal change is inexorable. Again, it is like watching a cloud in fast-motion, roiling on itself as it is slowly swept across the sky by the wind. Because you are already in time you can identify these images of time without knowing how it is possible to to be this, to know this.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.