Hannah Arendt Contemplating Augustine’s thinking about time.
Even if things should last, human life does not. We lose it daily. As we live the years pass through us and they wear us out into nothingness. It seems that only the present is real, for “things past and things to come are not”; but how can the present (which I cannot measure) be real since it has no “space”? Life is always either no more or not yet. Like time, life “comes from what is not yet, passes through what is without space, and disappears into what is no longer.” Can life be said to exist at all? Still the fact is that man does measure time. Perhaps man possesses a “space” where time can be conserved long enough to be measured, and would not this “space,” which man carries with himself, transcend both life and time?
Memory, the storehouse of time, is the presence of the “no more” (iam non) as expectation is the presence of the “not yet” (nondum). Therefore, I do not measure what is no more, but something in my memory that remains fixed in it. It is only by calling past and future into the present of remembrance and expectation that time exists at all. Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.
