CONFESSIONS(BOOKXI) 289
phenomena leave in you, which abides after they have passed by: that is what I measure
as a present reality, not the things that passed by so that the impression could be formed.
The impression itself is what I measure when I measure intervals of time. Hence either
time is this impression, or what I measure is not time.
What about when we measure silences, and say that this silent pause lasted as
long as that sound? Do we not strain our thought to retain the feeling of a sound’s dura-
tion, as though it were still audible, so as to be able to estimate the intervals of silence
in relation to the whole space of time in question? Without any articulate word or even
opening our mouths we go over in our minds poems, their lines, a speech, and we
assess their developmental patterns and the time they occupied in relation to one
another; and our estimate is no different from what it would have been if we had been
reciting them aloud.
Suppose a person wishes to utter a fairly long sound, and has determined before-
hand in his own mind how long it is to be. He must have first thought through that
period of time in silence and committed the impression of it to memory; then he begins
to utter the sound, which continues until it reaches the predetermined end. Or rather, it
does not “continue,” because the sound is evidently both something already heard and
something still to be heard, for the part of it already completed is sound that has been,
but the part that remains is sound still to be. Thus it is carried through as our present
awareness drags what is future into the past. As the future dwindles the past grows, until
the future is used up altogether and the whole thing is past.
28, 37. But how can a future which does not yet exist dwindle or be used up, and
how can a past which no longer exists grow? Only because there are three realities in the
mind which conducts this operation. The mind expects, and attends, and remembers, so
that what it expects passes by way of what it attends to into what it remembers. No one,
surely, would deny that the future is as yet non-existent? Yet an expectation of future
events does exist in the mind. And would anyone deny that the past has ceased to be? Yet
the memory of past events still lives on in the mind. And who would deny that the present
has no duration, since it passes in an instant? Yet our attention does endure, and through
our attention what is still to be makes its way into the state where it is no more. It is not,
therefore, future time which is long, for it does not exist; a long future is simply an expec-
tation of the future which represents it as long. Nor is the past along period of time,
because it does not exist at all; a long past is simply a memory of the past which represents
it as long.
- Suppose I have to recite a poem I know by heart. Before I begin, my expec-
tation is directed to the whole poem, but once I have begun, whatever I have plucked
away from the domain of expectation and tossed behind me to the past becomes the
business of my memory, and the vital energy of what I am doing is in tension between
the two of them: it strains toward my memory because of the part I have already
recited, and to my expectation on account of the part I still have to speak. But my
attention is present all the while, for the future is being channeled through it to
become the past. As the poem goes on and on, expectation is curtailed and memory
prolonged, until expectation is entirely used up, when the whole completed action has
passed into memory.
What is true of the poem as a whole is true equally of its individual stanzas and
syllables. The same is true of the whole long performance, in which this poem may be a
single item. The same thing happens in the entirety of a person’s life, of which all his
actions are parts; and the same in the entire sweep of human history, the parts of which
are individual human lives.