I like the circularity of the my wrist watch. The perfection of the circle shows times is just a measurement, there is no direction in time.
We believe these current times are accelerated as no other time before us, but it is not true. The Age of Enlightenment seems to have given us progress. At last, the arrow of time has direction… a better world. Somehow, we thought that understanding nature was going to make us better and a bit eternal. Modernity and Enlightenment gave birth, with pain as usual, to new mythologies… Marx creates outsourced goodness (through the state), Freud creates the coming back (return to the lost home), Levi-Strauss invents Arcadia with good shepherds, sheep with white wool and a perennial midday sun.
This endless path to perfection leads to the extinction of the end. We are in transit to perfection, to our betterment, everything is a step and there is no end. A hundred years ago, Bergson and Einstein vehemently discussed whether time was an absolute term or relative to circumstances (as the theory of relativity promulgated). In this century, we have forgotten myths, rites and we have embarked on a life without time. We have broken time into an infinite set of moments. We live from moment to moment, and we have thrown away the needle and the thread that sews them into a story, our story. There is no history, there is no beginning, there is no end, only a now, just a present in constant flight. But that infinite string of moments does not give us a forever. We continue to cease to exist…but that is no longer death, we simply perish in a moment without time or history.
We have made of life into an equation of economics. Pareto gives us the optimal result when we maximize our utility and exhaust the possibilities of improvement. That’s why we travel to more places… to all the places, we buy the latest electronic device… all electronic devices. We are not going to have a sub-optimal utility. You have to live to the fullest!
We count, we store, we add in a process without beginning or end. Homo ludens has given way to the incessant Homo faber. By killing time, we have also taken care of truth, the truth has become a temporary phenomenon attached to the moment. There is no continuity that supports time, there is no continuity that supports truth.
I return to the perfect sphere that leaves me where I was and will return to where it already is. The Old Testament already knew it, Ecclesiastes 1:9 “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
I want a time with direction, a time with an end. And that tick-tock that will end turns off the noise of the moment, connects me with the eternity of the self. Time gives us power, this Dasein, this “being here” on the way to an end puts us in command of the route. The self leads the steps while autumns follow summers, snows come after fallen leaves and the face of my watch turns round and round.
That’s why I want to hold your hand, because your wrinkled hand tells the story that your face already forgets. I hope to walk this path to disorder, thinking that my life is a moment of silence and order while your hand squeezes mine. On my way…
References
Being and Time by M Heidegger 1927
Naked now by R Rohr 2009
Manual of Political Economy by Vilfredo Pareto 1906
Nostalgia for the Absolute by George Steiner 1974
The scent of time by Byung-Chul Han 2009
The physicist and the philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the debate that changed our understanding of time by Jimena Canales 2020
Ecclesiastes