time

and so time flowed on through the darkness, deprived of advancing watch hands: time undivided and unmeasured. once it lost its points of demarcation, time ceased being a continuous line and became instead a kind of formless fluid that expanded or contracted at will. within this kind of time, i slept and woke and slept and woke, and became slowly and increasingly accustomed to life without timepieces. i trained my body to realize that i no longer needed time. but soon i was feeling tremendous anxiety. true, i had been liberated from the nervous habit of checking my watch every five minutes, but once the frame of reference of time faded completely away, i began to feel as if i had been flung into the ocean at night from the deck of a moving ship. no one noticed my screams, and the boat continued its forward advance, moving farther and farther away until it was about to fade from view.

--toru okada


i was just thinking about the existence of time the night before reading this passage, that it exists without a beginning and end, the way it's measured, not simply in terms of seconds, minutes, or hours, but also by the movement of the planets and the rhythm created by our repetitive physiological functions and their changes.