St. Augustine says that my very self is the present nexus of past and future. He ventures that neither the future nor the past really exists, technically speaking. “Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else.”8 Augustine, quite audaciously, suggests that the present is all there is. Which is why ephemerality is constitutive of creation. Augustine’s examples often invoke speech or song as a case study for how
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