Distentio Animi

In Book 11 of the Confessions, Augustine of Hippo posed the question that has troubled philosophers ever since: “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.” His answer was a turn inward as radical as anything in philosophy. The past does not exist, because it is gone; the future does not exist, because it has not arrived; and the present, if you try to seize it, has no duration at all. Time appears to be made entirely of things that are not there. Augustine’s resolution was to locate time inside the soul: there are not three times but three modes of a single present, each happening in the mind simultaneously. The present of things past is memory; the present of things present is attentio—direct attention; the present of things future is expectation. To be temporal is to live inside the