The entire hours of the day upload as much as twenty-four. the 1st of them has the others sooner or later, the final has them some time past. . . . A unmarried hour is itself made from fugitive moments. . . . If we will be able to ponder a few little bit of time which can't be divided into even the smallest on the spot second, that on my own is what we name “present. ” And this time flies through so fast from the long run into the earlier that it's an period of no length. Any length is divisible into prior and destiny. a gift second takes up no time. CONFESSIONS eleven. 15,20 the current itself is therefore continuously receding and inherently ungraspable. It exists among large planes of nonbeing that unfolded infinitely in both course: the earlier (which has no lifestyles, because it now not is) and the long run (which has no life, because it is but to be). but all of a person’s awareness, her whole skill to grasp and to appreciate, is circumscribed by way of and restricted to this infinitely tiny, eternally temporary second. Human cognizance drifts awash during this sea of nonbeing. “I am scattered in instances whose order i don't understand,” Augustine laments. “The storms of incoherent occasions rend my techniques, the inmost entrails of my soul” (Confessions eleven. 30,40). Experience—by definition, completely within the present—constantly runs among the palms of the soul like sand. How, then, can people recognize whatever? How can which means be distilled from this ceaseless stream of atomized adventure? How, certainly, can the brain take hold of whatever? Augustine starts to border a solution by way of considering language. Language, like event, is usually intrinsically knotted up in time: it too relies on the linear passage from being (present) to nonbeing (past). Consonants and vowels exchange to create phonemes, phrases stick with phrases, nouns verbs. either in its smallest devices (consonants and vowels) and in its greater ones (sentences and more), language works via having a starting, a center, and an finish. (Like all historic humans, Augustine thinks of phrases and texts orally, when it comes to their being spoken and heard; Confessions eleven. 6,8–11,13. ) Time shapes language, and language shapes time. it is just due to reminiscence, notwithstanding, that people can have the capacity to wring which means from language. reminiscence, says Augustine, is that a part of the soul that techniques either language and adventure. we can't comprehend the that means of a note, or of a sentence or of a speech, till its finish is reached. simply at that time can we be mindful the complete, and we then interpret what those devices of sound show. hence, if language is intrinsically narrative—syllables, phrases, stanzas, speeches all have a starting, a center, and an end—understanding is intrinsically retrospective. that means emerges and will in basic terms emerge in the course of the act of recollection. We owe to the integrative functionality of reminiscence the truth that we will imagine and understand in any respect. 10 yet that means is rarely instantly current: it's continually and unavoidably mediated in the course of the photographs, indicators, and phrases that reminiscence displays upon. hence, simply as time isn't the related because the devices that we degree it by means of, so additionally that means isn't the comparable as these phrases that we use in our attempt to express that means, or in these phrases from which reminiscence makes an attempt to wring which means.