A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

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.

A pine tree is time, Dgen had written, and bamboo is time. Mountains are time. Oceans are time . .

it was too much for her foggy brain to process.

She’d watched her mother’s mind dwindle, and she was familiar with the corrosive effect that plaque can have on brain function. Like her mother, Ruth often forgot things. She perseverated. Lost words. Slipped in and out of time.

The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn’t now, then where did it go?

nothing in the world is solid or real, because nothing is permanent, and all things—including trees and animals and pebbles and mountains and rivers and even me and you—are just kind of flowing through for the time being.

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.

Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention? Is the Internet a kind of temporal gyre, sucking up stories, like geodrift, into its orbit? What is its gyre memory? How do we measure the half-life of its drift?

“Shsetsu and Shishsetsu—they are both very strange. You see, there is no God in the Japanese tradition, no monolithic ordering authority in narrative—and that makes all the difference.”

I believe that in the deepest places in their hearts, people are violent and take pleasure in hurting each other.

Her mind was her power. She wanted her mind back.

When I wasn’t there, she used her stick. I liked feeling more useful than a stick.

Information is a lot like water; it’s hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.

Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.

“To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things.” •

Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.

The words were in my head and they leaked out of my mouth before I could stop them.

memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.