Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.
Interpretation
Time is a construct influenced by human perception and emotions, with past and present existing simultaneously.
This quote by W. G. Sebald reflects on the philosophical notion that time, as we understand it, is not an absolute reality but rather a subjective experience shaped by emotional states and consciousness. It suggests that the way we perceive and organize our memories and experiences into chronological order is a human-made framework, and instead, moments from the past and present exist together in a complex interplay that challenges our conventional understanding of time.
In practice
During a lecture on the nature of reality, one might quote Sebald to illustrate the complexity of human experience.
How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.
When I was a boy, I'd hide under the kitchen table and wind string around the chairs. I have a sense now that I am pulling on those threads. The more I pull, the more it comes unraveled.
If you're based in two places, on a bad day you see only the disadvantages everywhere. On a bad day, returning to Germany brings back all kinds of spectres from the past.
The seasons and the years came and went...and always...one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away - but from where? - and day by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.
You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.
No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.
Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.
If there is a knower of tongues here, fetch him; There's a stranger in the city And he has many things to say.
It never got weird enough for me.
War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
Would you take a billion dollars, if as part of the deal the Earth were made uninhabitable a year after your death? ... well, of course not; you care about your friends, above all your children, any grandchildren. But ... what if the deal calls for the planet to be poisoned a thousand years later? We feel strong obligations to generations in the near future - should we not feel the same way about our children's great-grandchildren and generations beyond them?
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