In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

PRESENT = PAST (ETERNITY) 403
tive, more sophisticated reflections try to-ironically or seriously-assess
the market value of time: "Everybody in the world, bureaucrat or boss,
takes it for granted that our sort of people have ages of time to waste.
It's different with those who have money. They can arrange everything
with money, and so they never have to wait. We who cannot pay with
cold cash have to pay with our time" (Traven, 41).
Time is a commodity, and this presupposes that time is experienced as
an agent of change. The historical specificity of the Present lies in the
vanishing of goals toward which change is supposed to lead. Devoid of
internal structures and goals, however, time suggests nothing but continuous
movement, without any rest or fulfillment: "What our age has
discovered is that in the moment in which one is changing, in which one
is moving, one feels better. It's impossible to go so far away that we find
the desire to return home. I realize here, at the moment of landing, that
I do not like traveling-that I like only movement. It is the sole truth,
the sole beauty. I will not be ashamed of my life so long as it is mobile.
The only fixed point: the idea of change" (Morand, 31-32). Continuous
movement is but one of the concepts that emerge from a chronotope
without structure, a chronotope in which Present, Past, and future can
no longer be kept apart. Another is Eternity. For time without structure
is eternal change, change without beginning or end. Indeed, so obvious
and frequent is the chain of associations between the experience of
accelerated change, the loss of time-structures, and the concept of Eternity,
that different versions of Eternity can be distinguished.
In the first version, Eternity simply follows from the absence of immanent
time-structures: "There is no progress or regress. There is no beginning
or end. There are no eras, and there is no history." Starting with
this radical statement, the philosopher Theodor Lessing tries to explain
the prevailing impression that temporal structures exist only as projections
of human consciousness. This leads him to the conclusion that
"man circles through eternity in a train named 'consciousness'" (Lessing,
384-385). Discussing the notion of "historical evolution," the historian
Kurt Riezler postulates that the interplay between "fate" and "freedom"
cannot be reduced to recurrent and therefore predictable patterns of
change. If, however, infinite modalities of this interplay generate a number
of historically different phenomena, the sheer fact of the interplay
between fate and freedom is eternal: "The interplay between freedom
and fatality is immutable-despite all the mutability in form and degree.