I remember being in an advanced Latin class in high school close to the summer, when all real work has gone out the window. We were talking through an "enrichment" activity where we looked over a variety of well-known Latin phrases and offered their easy translations. Caveat emptor, e pluribus unum, etc. And finally, tempus fugit came up. Normally, we translate that little phrase as 'time flies.' But, as I had become aware in my laborious work in that class on The Aeneid, 'fugit' really means something like 'runs away', or 'flees', as when an army has lost and is routing. It wasn't until that moment that I understood that time does not fly--like when we had fun--but that time actually runs away from us, with our hopeless attempts to catch up to it.
All of that to say: I'm overdo to post on this blog, but life has been fleeing. While I likely won't catch it, perhaps some more posts will appear in the coming months.
I do often wonder about our conception of time. Is it something that runs away from us? Does it progress rapidly while we have fun, escaping our notice? Does it actually always move at the same speed, as our physical processes seem to insist, or does it sometimes pool and eddy, stuck in a stagnant pond? Is time a schedule to be filled? Does it demand things from us? Is time our master? And of course, what I really want to know: in what way can we see time as a gift? And maybe even more: how could we treat time like a gift when the world around us sees time as a monster, a mechanism, an opponent? Can we treat time as a gift without fleeing to the hills? I wonder.
