Distribution Automatique

Saturday, April 17

Notes towards: *The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging*

It seems I'll never stop being fascinated
by the machinations of time. Of course
as you get older, the past means more
and more. Why should it still be surprising
that time bends in on itself, that its
equivalencies change, the way the light
so gradually changes through twilight into
evening into night? Past events keep reviving
themselves in the present, from the present,
towards the past, and at other times the
current changes it around the other way.


I was reading Hazlitt on this topic of
relations among temporal classifications. He emphasizes
that the past in downplayed with relation to the
present, and particularly the future. He thinks we
underestimate it because it is finished. But he
focuses on the fact that it is definitively real and
observeable- in ways that the future and the present
are not; one can return to pleasant times in ones thoughts
at will, and keep on exploring the various meanings of
ones experiences. In this way he is close to Rousseau,
particulary in his *Reveries of a Solitary Walker*, and also,
of course (and I've been noticing this more and more) to
Freud.