Our perception of time is tied inherently to being. That is, our present state of existence reflects not beings in time, but beings of time. Time for us is broken; divided into discrete moments, into sequenced events. One flows, no, not flows, one passes from one second to the next, but never in one single movement. If it were to flow in one movement, it would also do so in one moment, for the movement in time is the essence of being. For those not who have not in possession their own selves, time becomes an external construct, imposed from without.

This time is oppressive, for one’s being is not possessed by themselves, but one is instead in possession of time. Time seduces, one believes one has been captured by it. One further yet believes they only have a ‘limited’ amount of time. Of course, if I live in relation to the time I have, if moments indeed are discrete and discontinuous, I am living then in relation to time. I am being with time, with relation to time, and I must then possess a variety of things for which I have a limited amount of time to acquire. Further then one asks why live, if one has only a limited amount of time. To die is the first curse acquired when one is born, death is the only consequence one is promised with life. The man who lives for life’s sake, for the sake of others, for the sake of society lives not at all, for such a man is not in possession of his own being.

Melancholy appears in many different flavours. The first and most oppressive of course, is boredom. It is a monotonous melancholy, one caused by the acute perception of discontinuous moments of time. Or alternatively, one can think of boredom has the extension of moments, of their transformation from finite into larger finite moments. Boredom is melancholy in one of its purer forms, it is the experience on a momentary scale of a loss of desire. There is nothing to desire, which implies that there is no desire. Boredom is what happens when one is an overfed grotesque child of the goddess of pleasure, it finds its home in the hearts of the gluttonous, the greedy, the gratuitous. To be sure this gratuity need not be present physically, one need not be fat to be any of the above. One simply needs to be a slave to this cruel goddess.

The second kind of melancholy is one that is more dispersed, more ever-present, like small sips of wine one might drink through an evening. This is the melancholy that comes from the mind-numbing work we are involved with on a daily basis, to act as a cog in the machine, to be separate from that which we are supposedly creating. But this separation is the basis of our existence, and it is through this separation that we confuse ourselves as in pursuit of things or people or meaning. It is the melancholy of a life poorly lived, where one traces back their origins, their actions, their cowardice and their inaction, and the ultimate futility of their realisation which comes not at the beginning, but at the end. This is remorse.

There is further the melancholy apprehended only when we come into contact with another being, one we are incapable of understanding. Just as the man from the capital passes through a small town and pities the residents who have never left their home to see the world outside, so too do the residents of the town pity the traveller, resigned to living in a putrid infested hole surrounded by dirt, death, and dust one calls a city. We are incapable in of ever connecting with another. We may come into contact with, we may apprehend, and we may even briefly intermingle, but I may never know what another person experiences, we are fundamentally divided.

The most subtle, and in my view the most potent form of melancholy is melancholy over the loss of love for someone or someplace. It is this melancholy which pervades my being and seems my curse to carry. The sadness I feel when separated from someone or some place I love is not due to the sadness felt from the loss of the person or object, but the knowledge of the eventual impending loss of love. I wish for nothing but to feel love and to give that love to all I hold dear, and it is the knowledge that I will one day no longer love them that haunts me most.

The man whose present is dispersed in the many activities of the day to day, who lives only to avoid the death he so fears, then inoculates himself in pleasure, does not live at all. His fate is inevitable, boredom will be his sole inheritance.

Returning to being. Being in time is no ‘being’ at all, for when one is pure being there is nothing to possess, to acquire. Being in time is the resolution of the loop we find ourselves in. That we are cause and consequence at all times seems to escape us. Only a ‘choiceless awareness’ which pervades our entire being frees us from this loop, the simultaneous awareness that there is no difference between cause and effect, there is no separation, that the cause is to be found in the effect, and the effect in the cause, neither would exist in separation, and only together do they form a new complex, or being. Being in time then would be the localization of the infinite within what those who do not possess their selves would call ‘the finite’, or the self, but the self may never comprehend this, and those who force their selves to confront this go inevitably insane. There is an overflow of joy, and just as a lack of air prevents the birth of a flame, a gust of wind oppresses it, extinguishing it entirely. Being in time localizes the infinite construct of time within every, or more appropriately, within one moment, there is no past moment or future moment, there is only the present moment, in eternity.

The mistake we make then is to assume that time is a pre-existing construct, one which assists me in my understanding of this world, a prior component of my consciousness. This is patently false. Only an impoverished mind would suggest the immutability of time, that time exists with and without, for time would simply cease to exist without consciousness, would it not? For it is only when I am conscious that I realise that time ‘flows’ in a particular way, though it would be more apt to call it a march, for there is nothing approximating a flow in our understanding of time. Time, being dependent on life is finite with regard to itself, for time may only exist with life and without life, there is nothing before and perhaps nothing after. Birth and death become momentary, but life, infinite.