In Book XI of the Confessions, Augustine asks himself about the nature of time and, despite being interrupted by exclamations in the style of an evangelical preacher that I find quite tiresome, he presents a lucid analysis of our capacity for perceiving time. He observes that we are always in the present, because the past is past and therefore does not exist, and the future has yet to arrive, so it does not exist either. And he asks himself how we can be aware of duration – or even be capable of evaluating it – if we are always only in a present which is, by definition, instantaneous. How can
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