But the deeper truth behind all this is to be found in Heidegger’s mysterious suggestion that we don’t get or have time at all—that instead we are time. We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments. To “master” them would first entail getting outside of them, splitting off from them. But where would we go? “Time is the substance I am made of,” writes Jorge Luis Borges. “Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I
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