Strange Days | Sven Birkerts

Using the enforced idleness that comes after major surgery, Sven Birkerts meditates on how time contracts and dilates and what that means for a sense of self.

- "“How do you pass the time?” suggests the basic model of existence, in which living a life is seen on the one hand as traversing an unspecified span of time—marked out in years—and on the other, as moving through the natural cycle of hours, from dawn to dusk. Time, then, is understood to be a medium one negotiates. And in this respect: how do I p... See more

- "The layers of the night are in fact the layers of the self; they offer the most random unfolding of the accumulations of experience—everything that happened and mattered and lapsed away as the next new thing claimed the attention. There is no way to guess what will suddenly surface in those hours. At times I need only to call to mind a specific ... See more

- "What could be more worthy, and rewarding, I think, than to give over the second half of life to the recovery of the first?"