the past lies ahead

sophielwang.com · 612 words · saved by 2 readers

The clouds are moving by so fast today. I tell myself it is just the wind, but when was the last time I noticed them moving this quickly? What unsettles me is not the speed of the clouds, but the feeling that time is moving without leaving anything tangible behind. I suppose that this is just how it feels to be alive inside Time. The new year lies ahead. In most linguistic models, an event in the future is seen as “in front of” the experiencer. This directionality feels natural, and I wonder if that's because of the language we have learned to use. Yet even our most ordinary words provide perspectives of other ways to arrange time in space. In Chinese, the word for “before” is 以前, where 前 means “in front.” In everyday use it means “earlier,” but it also literally translates to “that which is in front.” In Germanic languages such as English, "before" works in the same double sense. What lies before us is in front of us, and what happens before us is earlier in time1. If this space-time

Madame Roger Jourdain (1883-1885) by John Singer Sargent The clouds are moving by so fast today. I tell myself it is just the wind, but when was the last time I noticed them moving this quickly? What unsettles me is not the speed of the clouds, but the feeling that time is moving without leaving anything tangible behind. I suppose that this is just how it feels to be alive inside Time. The new year lies ahead. In most linguistic models, an event in the future is seen as “in front of” the experiencer. This directionality feels natural, and I wonder if that's because of the language we have…

the past lies ahead

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