kellogg's time loops

It’s the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time.

I apologize to time for the muchness of the world overlooked per second.

…unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

Time isn't an orderly stream. Time isn't a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We're too slight, too inconsequntial, despite all of our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about. Time is an ocean of inertia, drowning out the small vibrations, absorbing the slosh and churn, the foam and wash, and we're up here, flapping and slapping and just generally spazzing out, and sure, there's a little splashing on the surface, but that doesn't even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us.

In truth, the historian can never get away from the question of time in history: time sticks to his thinking like soil to a gardener’s spade.

The past is “contemporaneous” with the present that it has been.

The notion that the future is ahead and the assumption that time goes forward are perhaps the most fundamental orientational metaphors we have, but the fact is that they contradict each other. We might think of the first metaphor, with Lakoff and Johnson, as a human subject moving in a landscape, eyes facing the direction of travel, so that the future is ahead. In this case the subject is moving forward while the landscape moved through stands still. How do we reconcile this with the idea that time moves forwards? It would seem that, in relation to a subject moving from left to right, from the past into the future, time must either be static or be moving in the opposite direction: the direction that would, in fact, be backwards if the person involved were to walk that way.