Reflections: Time Outed

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It is time that tortures us. Man’s whole effort is to escape from it, that is to say, to escape from past and future by embedding himself in the present, or else by inventing a past and a future to suit himself. ~ Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks

Perhaps you are still young, at an age where time seems to be a restless waiting for things to happen, every minute, every hour, every day, week, month, year, one more obstacle on a long and winding road that surely leads to some vague, but special, event that is always coming, always about to manifest itself as your own, unique, reward. Just for being. Just for that.

Or maybe you are no longer so very young and have learned to ignore horizons and to stare only toward those things which present themselves within your reach. Perhaps your vision, your perception of time, has become the radius of a comfortable circle, within the familiar confines of which alternating bouts of work and entertainment join forces to distract your attention, so that time hardly seems a factor in your busy, your important, your so very centered, life.

But, then again, perhaps maturity, or—as is the case w/r/t the precocious observations of David Foster Wallace which follow—an abnormally acute gift for pattern recognition, has rendered you vulnerable to recognition of time’s literal, rather horrible, realities:

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable – if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.*

Keep this phrase in your mind: “…like a thief in the night.”

Dig it.

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* David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
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