Distentio animi
The distension of the soul: in Augustine, time is not an external thing but a stretching of the mind, strained between the memory of what is no longer and the expectation of what is not yet. The past and the future have being only in the soul—as the *present of the past*, the *present of the present*, the *present of the future*. To measure time is to measure this inner tension; and this tension has a reverse side, the scattering of the soul away from its center, to which the gathering into the eternal present responds.
toute ma vie à moi n'est qu'une dissipation
The Latin term combines distentio—the act of stretching by pulling apart—and animi, of the soul. In Book XI of the Confessions, Augustine dismisses the notion of time lodged in things: the past “no longer is,” the future “is not yet,” and the present, if it endured, “would no longer be time; it would be eternity.” Only one place remains where the three times persist—the mind: the present of the past is memory, the present of the present is current attention, the present of the future is expectation. Time is this tension that holds together what has fled and what is to come.
This tension has two faces. As measure, it is the operation by which the soul retains and anticipates. As condition, it is a dissipation—Moreau’s word for distentio: the soul scattered “at the whim of my former days,” outside itself. Against this scattering, Augustine does not oppose a better use of time but another order: to be gathered “in the immutability that is always present,” reunited with unity, “without remembrance of what is no more, without anxious longing for what must come and pass.”
To be distinguished from Weil’s attention, though distentio is its kin: attention is the point of the present, the gathering in the instant; distension is its opposite, the soul pulled toward its two edges. And from Taoist wuhua: Zhuangzi does not regard the flow of time as a fall from the One—transformation is the fabric of reality, which one embraces without nostalgia. Distentio animi ≠ wuhua: one is a failure to gather upward, the other a current in which to let oneself drift.