溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
What Is Time — I Know Until You Ask, and When You Ask I Know Not?
What everyone lives through yet no one can pin in words — what, after all, is time?
If no one asks me, I know; but if I want to explain it to one who asks, I do not know.
Augustine attempts his own answer — time is not an outer body but a "distension" of the mind: the past exists as memory, the future as expectation, both only within the soul. Fifteen centuries later Newton declared the opposite, that time is an absolute reality flowing alone, indifferent to any mind. Kant turned inward again, holding time to be neither an outer thing nor a mental state but the form by which we perceive the world. Whether time lies without or within, begun in Augustine's honest confession, stayed unclosed even as Einstein wove time together with space.
Even in an age where clocks and schedules measure life tightly, what that time is still eludes words. The most common thing is the most mysterious.
Augustine's confession remains among the most honest sentences in philosophy.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Augustine's confession remains among the most honest sentences in philosophy. Time is the most familiar thing we live each moment, yet the instant we try to explain it, it slips through our fingers. I read this not as a confession of ignorance but as a form of knowing. Some things are too near to be seen — like breath, like time. Spending time every day yet never able to say what it is, I stand before this ancient confession too.
✍️Your Answer
The lineage of the ancients ends here. Now it is your turn before the question. There is no right answer — only how you, today, would answer.
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This is not a museum of answers but a lineage of questions. All sources are public-domain texts; the lineage and reflection are 100% original ONGO content.
