Even the words that we are speaking now
thieving time
has stolen away,
and nothing can return,
—from the Odes or Horace
The Greatest Mystery
I stop and do nothing. Nothing happens.
I am thinking about nothing.
I listen to the passing of time.
This is time, familiar and intimate.
We are taken by it. The rush of seconds, hours, years
that hurls us toward life then drags us toward nothingness . . .
We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is in time.
It’s solemn music nurtures us, Opens the world to us,
Troubles us, frightens and lulls us.
The universe unfolds into time,
the events of the universe succeed each other
in an orderly way: pasts, presents, futures
—the past is fixed, the future open . . . And yet
all of this has turned out to be false,
the features of time have proved to be
approximations, like the flatness of earth
or a revolving sun . . .
by Carlo Rovelli
from The Order of Time
Riverhead Books, 2018
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