A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

The cat, irked by her restlessness and inattention, abandoned her lap. He didn’t like it when she went on the computer and used her fingers to type and scroll instead of to scratch his head. It was a waste of two perfectly good hands as far as he was concerned, and so he went in search of Oliver. She

opaque. Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.

Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now!

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth. —Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé

Jiko also says that to do zazen is to enter time completely.

meditation