Apart from concerns about the weather, time certainly flies. In the words of Steve Miller: "time keeps on slippin' into the future." Philosophically time is an interesting concept, or category. St. Augustine took what we might call, truly for lack of a better term, a subjective position with regard to time, writing that time does not exist in reality, but is only a function of change, or more specifically, how we mentally and perceptively apprehend changes in reality. On this basis, Augustine contends that time cannot be infinite because it is merely the perception of change in the created order. For his part, Heidegger argued that time finds its meaning in death, in our realization that our days are numbered, that we are born to die. While Heidegger concedes that our own death is never an event in our life, he still holds that it is our awareness of our finitude that informs our understanding of time. Of course, these two takes on time are not inherently at odds with each other.
Another contemporary (note temp in the word- time conditioned) writer, Michael Stipe had this to say, "I believe... time as an abstract/Explain the change, the difference between/What you want and what you need"
The late writer W.G. Seabald, whose prose moves me every bit as much of that of my dear Frenchmen, Camus and Kerouac, in his book Austerlitz, wrote this about time:
"It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time."
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