15 July

The humanities gave us much more profound ways to understand time well before modern science. Take Proust's remarkable description of how the past never actually passes, it's always still here. That a simple taste or smell can instantly bring it into actuality again, as in his famous example of eating his madeleine cake. It's vital to get here that Proust isn't saying this retrieves a simple memory of that earlier time, eating the madeleine. It reinstates the past itself. We are literally there again, for a fleeting moment, that's actually how it feels. The idea memories reside in our head was one Henri Bergson also demolished, just after Proust. Memory is the past itself, shifting from a virtual state into an actual state. Time never actually passes, it shifts from actual to virtual and back again.