July 20
“What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know. And yet: what is past is no more, what is to come is not yet — only the present is truly there.”
Confessions, XI (freely rendered)
Listening mode
“What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know. And yet: what is past is no more, what is to come is not yet — only the present is truly there.”
Someone stops you in the street and asks the way to a place you have been a hundred times. You start to answer and notice that the street names escape you. “Right at the pharmacy, no, before that …” Your hand points in a direction that your sentence promptly corrects.
And yet you have never got lost on this route. You know it, just not in the form an explanation demands. When you walk it, you only ever need to know the next corner; the rest follows once you are there. A description, on the other hand, is supposed to hold the whole route at once, the before and after in the right order, seen from a vantage point where no one ever stands.
The one kind of knowing is no less precise than the other. It is simply bound to the moment in which it is needed, and it is hard to send ahead.
The person thanks you and sets off, a little hesitantly. Later you take the route yourself and pay attention to the corner before the pharmacy. You turn before you have decided why.
