Neither Past Nor Future

Time, we handle it with every sentence—yesterday, just now, tomorrow—with the ease of those who know what they are talking about. Yet stop to consider the word, to ask what this so-familiar thing actually is, and that assurance crumbles. It held only because no one was looking at it.

Augustine, in the eleventh book of the Confessions, stops and looks. The admission comes at once.

What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know.

Practical knowledge evaporates the moment it is pressed to account for itself. For when examined closely, time slips away on all sides. The past “is no more”; the future “is not yet”; only the present remains—but if it lingered, if it did not constantly slip into the past, “it would no longer be time; it would be eternity.” The present has being only on the condition of ceasing: a thing that is only in the act of no longer being. Time, Augustine writes, is that which “tends toward not being.”

If the past is no more and the future not yet, where do they exist when we name them? Augustine finds but one place for them.

There are three times: the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future. For this threefold mode of presence exists in the mind; I see it nowhere else. The present of the past is memory; the present of the present is immediate attention; the present of the future is expectation.

Where does time exist, according to Augustine?

Outside the mind, neither past nor future has being: one is no more, the other is not yet. Augustine recognizes only a present, without extension. The three times exist solely in the soul: memory holds the past, attention holds the present, expectation holds the future. Time is not a thing outside us, but a tension of the mind.

To measure time, then, is not to measure a thing: it is to feel the soul stretch between what it retains and what it awaits. Augustine names this tearing asunder with a word that also speaks of a wound—his life, he confesses, “is but a dissipation,” a being scattered “at the whim of my former days.”

Against this dispersion, he opposes but one term: to be gathered “in the immutability ever present,” reunited with unity, “without remembrance of what is no more, without anxious longing for what must come and pass.” The remedy for time is not a better time; it is the present that does not pass, the eternity where nothing flees. Augustine presses through the instant to emerge above it.

Another voice, born at the opposite end of the world, pauses at the same point—the soul caught between what is no more and what is not yet—and draws from it an entirely different conclusion. Zhuangzi has just lost his wife. A friend finds him sitting, singing, tapping the rhythm on a bowl. When reproached, he replies:

The phases of death and life follow one another, like the periods of the four seasons.

He does not feign indifference: “for a moment, I was affected,” he says, before realizing “there was no cause.” What unties grief is not hardness, but knowledge—seeing that birth and death follow one another like winter to spring, that a being passes from one form to another in an endless transformation. “Now that I understand this, I do not mourn her.” No eternal present to rejoin: the turn of seasons, which one embraces rather than clings to.

Let us not confuse the two hands. For Augustine, time is a lack, the sign of a soul fallen from unity; his inclination draws him upward—out of the flux, gathered into an eternal present that knows neither before nor after. For Zhuangzi, there is neither fall nor beyond the current: transformation is the very fabric of reality, and ease consists in yielding to it, not tearing oneself away. One rises above time; the other flows with it. To take these two gestures for one would betray them both.

And yet they meet at one point, precisely where time hurt. What weighs, in both, is the grip on what is no more and the restless reach toward what is not yet—the memory that holds, the expectation that pulls. Loosen that grip, and what remains? The present alone, that point without thickness. Augustine reads in it the narrow gate through which eternity surfaces; Zhuangzi, the threshold where each season is fully what it is. The same ridge, crossed in opposite directions: one gathers there toward the heights, the other surrenders to the flow. For both, the instant ceases to flee the moment one stops chasing what borders it.

The past is no more, the future is not yet. It has never been otherwise; and it is there, on that thread which seemed to bear nothing, that both stand firm.

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