The Order of Time

Buddha summed this up in a few maxims that millions of human beings have adopted as the foundations of their lives: birth is suffering, decline is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering, union with that which we hate is suffering, separation from that which we love is suffering, failure to obtain what we desire is suffering.19 It’s suf

It is memory that solders together the processes, scattered across time, of which we are made. In this sense we exist in time. It is for this reason that I am the same person today as I was yesterday. To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves.

Traces of the past exist, and not traces of the future, only because entropy was low in the past. There can be no other reason, since the only source of the difference between past and future is the low entropy of the past.

It is what philosophers call ‘indexicality’: the characteristic of certain words which have a different meaning every time they are used, a meaning determined by where, how, when and by whom they are being spoken. Words such as ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘I’, ‘this’, ‘tonight’ all assume a different meaning depending on who utters them and the circumstances in

In its anxious pursuit of objectivity, science must not forget that our experience of the world comes from within. Every glance that we cast towards the world is made from a particular perspective.

But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is, in the end, something good and even beautiful, because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.

A group of boys on a field decide to have a match. They form teams. This is how we used to do it: the two most enterprising would take turns choosing the players they wanted, having tossed a coin to see who would have first pick. At the end of this solemn procedure, there were two teams. Where were the teams before they were chosen? Nowhere. They e

The grammar of many modern languages conjugates verbs in the ‘present’, ‘past’ and ‘future’ tenses. It is not well adapted for speaking about the real temporal structure of reality, which is more complex. Grammar developed from our limited experience, before we became aware of its imprecision when it came to grasping the rich structure of the world

The world is more like Naples than Singapore.