Memory is of past things. But the past is referred to by reference to a definite time. Memory therefore is a way of knowing things in reference to a definite time, which is to say that it knows things by reference to here and now. But such knowledge is the province of the senses, not of intellect. So memory belongs not to the intellectual part of the soul, but to the same part as the senses.

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don’t suffer, time flows, so that they don’t live in time, in fact they never have.

Change is faster and slower. But time is not. For the slow and the fast are defined by time, fast being the thing moving much in little time, slow being the thing moving little in much. But time is not defined by time, not by its being so much nor by its being of such a sort. It is clear, then, that time is not change.

If it made sense to say that time flows then it would make sense to ask how fast it flows, which doesn’t seem to be a sensible question. Some people reply that time flows at one second per second, but even if we could live with the lack of other possibilities, this answer misses the more basic aspect of the objection. A rate of seconds per second is not a rate at all in physical terms. It is a dimensionless quantity, rather than a rate of any sort.

Time is not a number with which we count but the number that is counted, and this turns out to be always different before and after, because the nows are different. The number of a hundred horses and of a hundred men is one and the same, but the things of which it is a number are different – the horses are different from the men.

If time is objective the physicist must have discovered that fact, if there is Becoming the physicist must know it; but if time is merely subjective and Being is timeless, the physicist must have been able to ignore time in his construction of reality and describe the world without the help of time. […] If there is a solution to the philosophical problem of time, it is written down in the equations of mathematical physics.

Perhaps it would be better to say that the solution is to be read between the lines of the physicist’s writings. Physical equations formulate specific laws […] but philosophical analysis is concerned with statements about the equations rather than with the content of the equations themselves.

I do not want to die no, I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this ‘I’ to live – this poor ‘I’ that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.