WHEN I WAS YOUNGER THAN I am now, I used to think Time was arranged in neat little blocks as on the calendar. The “bottom of the month” felt like the bottom of the month, and I delighted in each month’s miraculous invert midnight flip; individual weeks swayed as a rope bridge over sequential chasms whose walls were the weekends.
A ghost of that image still brushes my mind whenever I think about calendars, specifically my “place” “on” them. But Time no longer seems to come in boxes; instead it flows away from everything I see: as though everything I see is but one end of a string stretching back to that thing’s inception, visible not through eyes which measure time by little circles but which see its unfolding procession as Becoming instead of Being; as the concretion of thought into form; as an inexorable obscuring mass leaving all-that-is in its wake; as Potential congealing into Persistence; as a big wall across the half of the universe that doesn’t exist yet; as a massive bubble floating from generational mind to generational mind in one slow ecstatic unmovable direction; as a function of space; as a unit of poetry; as Void dustily manifest in the five dimensions of daily life: length, width, height, duration, and comfort.
The shape of Time is the shape of the mind which perceives it. Why else would it fit so seamlessly?