To tie overthinking and the concept of time to each other: if the past and future don't exist, and we only have the present moment, then overthinking has no use, for it takes away from the present moment.
In any case, I really like you writing, you're good at explaining but still keeping it simple enough. And good that you're back!
Btw, I've been sitting on an essay about overthinking for 4 months now, I guess I'll take your post as a signal that it's time for me to finish writing it!
Again a brilliant piece of writing!!! Thank you Cathy van de Graaf for your remark too : “As long as time isn’t real maybe death isn’t either!” A huge relieve if you think about this!
You’re back!!! Please feel free to do all of your overthinking out loud... it’s lovely.
Also, time is pretty interesting. I think we would even know it existed if we didn’t mark the time we are alive in years, and schedule our days. Even those are just ways to define being alive and what this even is!!!
the questions you ask about time are raised by Augustine in Book XI of the Confessions! if you haven't already, check it out. In it he provides what is, to me anyway, the most compelling definition of time (even more compelling than how the scientists define time). in the latin he defines time with the phrase "distensio animi," which is basically untranslatable but can be translated in the english as "distension of the mind" or "stretching of the mind". What that means, in short, is that time is not objective, a measure that exists in the universe, but is in fact entirely *subjective*: time itself is how the mind experiences itself in the world. it is thus the basic ingredient for the mind to understand itself, including too the outside world.
Kant, much later in his groundbreaking text, the critique of pure reason, will famously define time in a very different yet similar way (at least insofar as time is subjective and not objective). Time and space, for Kant, are basically "forms of sensibility", which is to say that they are what enable perception in the first place. Without time and space, the human mind will not be able to "see" anything in the world at all (that is, receive and interpret phenomena).
but notice, also, how this "subjective" view of time is what has provided the foundation for maybe the most compelling "novel" of the 20th c.: Marcel Proust's in search of lost time. because time is entirely subjective, this means that "the past" is in fact never "past"--it can be opened anew at any moment in the future (whether that be a scent, a song, or whatever else besides) and layered thus with new meaning. this is, to me anyway, the profound mystery of time: though time is structured chronologically (the past, the present, the future), this order itself is never chronological: sometimes the future is buried there, in the past, and at other times the past awaits a futural discovery. So TS Elliot's poem, the four quartets:
Glad to have you back. I was wondering when you’d return!
The nature of time is a truly strange and mindboggling one. Like you, it once scared me, but now I also look at it as a good thing. As long as time isn’t real maybe death isn’t either.
To tie overthinking and the concept of time to each other: if the past and future don't exist, and we only have the present moment, then overthinking has no use, for it takes away from the present moment.
In any case, I really like you writing, you're good at explaining but still keeping it simple enough. And good that you're back!
Btw, I've been sitting on an essay about overthinking for 4 months now, I guess I'll take your post as a signal that it's time for me to finish writing it!
👏 👏 👏
Well worth the wait. Thank you, Shifra, for your words of absurdity. 🙏🏻
Again a brilliant piece of writing!!! Thank you Cathy van de Graaf for your remark too : “As long as time isn’t real maybe death isn’t either!” A huge relieve if you think about this!
Shelley in the Belly ! Absurd is the word. Time is for rhyme.
You’re back!!! Please feel free to do all of your overthinking out loud... it’s lovely.
Also, time is pretty interesting. I think we would even know it existed if we didn’t mark the time we are alive in years, and schedule our days. Even those are just ways to define being alive and what this even is!!!
the questions you ask about time are raised by Augustine in Book XI of the Confessions! if you haven't already, check it out. In it he provides what is, to me anyway, the most compelling definition of time (even more compelling than how the scientists define time). in the latin he defines time with the phrase "distensio animi," which is basically untranslatable but can be translated in the english as "distension of the mind" or "stretching of the mind". What that means, in short, is that time is not objective, a measure that exists in the universe, but is in fact entirely *subjective*: time itself is how the mind experiences itself in the world. it is thus the basic ingredient for the mind to understand itself, including too the outside world.
Kant, much later in his groundbreaking text, the critique of pure reason, will famously define time in a very different yet similar way (at least insofar as time is subjective and not objective). Time and space, for Kant, are basically "forms of sensibility", which is to say that they are what enable perception in the first place. Without time and space, the human mind will not be able to "see" anything in the world at all (that is, receive and interpret phenomena).
but notice, also, how this "subjective" view of time is what has provided the foundation for maybe the most compelling "novel" of the 20th c.: Marcel Proust's in search of lost time. because time is entirely subjective, this means that "the past" is in fact never "past"--it can be opened anew at any moment in the future (whether that be a scent, a song, or whatever else besides) and layered thus with new meaning. this is, to me anyway, the profound mystery of time: though time is structured chronologically (the past, the present, the future), this order itself is never chronological: sometimes the future is buried there, in the past, and at other times the past awaits a futural discovery. So TS Elliot's poem, the four quartets:
"What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from."
(Little Gidding, V)
Glad to have you back. I was wondering when you’d return!
The nature of time is a truly strange and mindboggling one. Like you, it once scared me, but now I also look at it as a good thing. As long as time isn’t real maybe death isn’t either.