And if flashes of panic occur, as they must do, this old equilibrium can, with patience and with rigour, balance out its worst features, or transform them, like a slow rolling ocean eroding rocks, though their essential matter remains in some form, dissolved though the atoms of terror might be, to a slurry of apathy rhythmically marked by time.
Here time isn't felt as oppressive; it entails no distortion in an everlasting present.
The past is groped for as a waker gropes for the details of his dream, his sour or pleasant dream, his guilty, inevitable past. All my actions in the past seem to me now compulsive and inevitable, as if another man had done them, an insubstantial ghost, whose inner workings and motivations i cannot guess at. He sees other worlds than me, that man of a year ago. And of course i envy him his naievety.
But when one has the present on one's side one has a lot. Bring one perspective to bear on everything, radically diverse and divergent, facile and profound, giving birth to metaphorical beauties and basking in the qualia, in the rich bath of phenomena whose waves caress and flow through you, attack and depart from you with a painfully slow but inevitable rhythm, pushing you here, pulling you there, adding to and eroding you.
Is it meaningless, you ask?
Completely. The pinnacle of this metaphysics is the loosening of the point and the disruption of the line. Its tedious slow dispersal. All that is commonplace enough.