It is discomfort and pain which produce the keenest experience of time as duration, or as nested durations. Does this structure still stay stationary, does it still represent a self, does it belong to an aesthetic subject? The structure is secondary to the pain which is primary and unthought, the structure is imposed as a way of managing the obstinate event of pain. Even just to think about what it is is difficult. Pain moves, it is always building up or fading, 'it comes and goes', and these movements subtend periods as much as they define subjectivity. Pain is what only you can feel, no matter how much empathy is extended, it is utterly concentrated, resembling nothing but itself. You endure, you play tricks with your waiting, count, restart the count, try to begin again as if it were a new beginning, that is, you try to map a past duration onto the future one, 'if I could get through that one then I can get through this one, the one starting now.' There seem to be cycles of absorption, of attentiveness, where awareness of the cutting edge is dulled, periods of attention where the over-riding need to stop the pain is side-tracked; but whereas a past cycle took up so much time, this cycle only persists for a fraction of that. Inside a cycle you are not apart from the sensations without feeling the need to do anything about it, without having to face your lack of control. It becomes a matter of internal administration, a mediation between agencies, planners and executives, competing ministries for various cares. They operate in time, economic units to which energy and attention must be allocated. Wherever there is energy there is time: pain and time, pleasure and time, food and time, sex and time, the time of human interactions, life time.