ABSTRACT
In my last lecture I was attempting to study that curious mixture of permanence and flux, of empty self-sufficiency which yet has a necessary relation to possible occupation, which we call the time, the temporality of the world. We feel this time with our bones as something that in passing or going by also always must go on, and that in changing always stays the same, and we also feel it with our bones as being something that, while indifferent to the coloured play that is varyingly crowded and spaced out in it, is yet essentially receptive to that coloured play, having as it were a built-in place for the permanences of existence and nature that will give flesh and blood to its constant framework, as well as places for the ever changing states that are presupposed by as well as presupposing that framework. Time as a phenomenon seems always about to dissolve into one or other of its contrasted aspects, either becoming a pure flux in which nothing constant is discernible, or an absolute permanence in which all succession is frozen: to come down on either side of these contrasts is, in effect, to reject time altogether, to deprive it of sense.
