Time and Truth

A good essay, like a good poem, is a complete thought. Books, I think, are food for thought but rarely constitute one themselves. The worst books are those that unnecessarily expand a thought that could have been fully expressed in a page or two. They are neither cogent nor nourishing. They are merely a distraction to occupy the mind when it is too tired to pay attention and too nervous to sleep. A complete thought isn't what we're taught in grade school. It isn't story elucidating a moral lesson. It isn't a symbol for something ineffable. It isn't a puzzle resolved by logic. It isn't an equation, a proof, a synthesis, or a paradox. A complete thought can't be reduced to anything more fundamental, and its parts have no meaning and no reality other than the continuous tension of the whole that runs through them. Science is obsessed with synthesizing thought, of separating thought from the source and observing it as an object. This obsession was, perhaps, the inevitable result of our spatializing time, of conceiving time as the beginning, the middle, and the end. Time, displayed all-at-once in our imagination, was made of thought, and thought, we concluded, must exist outside of time. The metaphysical, those idealized equations, mythologies, moral lessons, concepts, and contradictions constituted truth that preceded time. The complete thought resulted in the world, and Science became obsessed with discovering that thought, owning it, becoming what Science conceived as God.

But we know better. Time wasn't created by thought; thought, rather, was conceived in time. Thought spatialized time as a convenience, an analogy. And analogies are tools of thought which thought created. We complete thoughts, we don't discover them. Thought isn't a thing, it's a process that can be expressed in time. It precedes creativity, it doesn't precede Creation, it doesn't precede time.