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Time


“Time is an enormous problem to us, a tremendous and demanding question, perhaps the most vital one of metaphysics” Jorge Luis Borges, História da Eternidade, 1936

The velocity of the tree deceives our fast eye. We look, it is still. Turn around and look again? Still still.

And yet it moves, as Galileo would say.

It twists, turns and interacts with other trees, with us.

It may even walk.

And, every time we look, it's still.

Likewise, we may be blind to the effects of our deeds on history, to the effects of our actions (and omissions) on the TV news. And one may be blind to the growth of an addiction, whilst enjoying a fag, a pint, a shot of heroin, or the adrenaline of a high bet.

Time is as hard to understand as it is our hugest collective construction. It was circular when, in the traditional rural society, it was commanded by the sun and the seasons. It became linear when industrialization brought the belief in progress, science showed us a history beyond creation and urbanization tuned our lives with the clock. Now it coexists with the multiple shapes introduced by relativity physics.

And yet we feel its force throwing us to the emptiness, a feeling best expressed by Walter Benjamin’s reflections before Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus:

“…The Angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from the Paradise; it has got hold of the wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him to the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward…” (1969: 257)

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