Tag: Time

• May 5, 2025

  Is Time Real?

  1. Why is the question interesting or relevant, to begin with? Because there’s a conceptual “set” consisting, notably, of ego, space, time, objectivity, and movement. One of the chief members of this set is time. For instance, how can ego exist in the absence of time? How can an independently existing world unfold in the…
• February 22, 2014

  Emily Dickinson on being in pain

  In ‘Pain Has an Element of Blank,’ the poet Emily Dickinson (1830-86) seeks to bring into sharper focus the unique quality of being in extraordinary pain. That quality is expressed in a particular experience of time. She writes, PAIN has an element of blank; It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A…
• January 24, 2013

  Loneliness and presentness

  Yesterday, in the middle of a philosophical conversation about a conversation partner’s sense of loneliness, it occurred to me that loneliness just is the experience of not being present. Loneliness is the word we typically use to designate this nebulous feeling of lack: the other is not there, the past in which love was is…
• January 5, 2012

  ‘Are you done with that?’

  We have nearly forgotten what it’s like to take our time. Coffee comes pierced by a talon, is pulled down by a waterfall, is ready in less than a minute. It tastes like a hot gulp of brown. Daily, we are faced with the prospects of drinking big gulps, of chugging, of downing, or of…
• December 19, 2011

  On cat days

  When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; and when I am walking alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts are sometimes elsewhere, for most of the time I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me. –Montaigne, Essays 1 Watch the…