Feeling and Time: The Experience of Passage and its Relation to Meaning

This essay notes the relationship between meaning and the felt passage of time. The concrete experience of fluctuations in the rapidity of passage seems to be universal to the human condition. We often associate the rapid passage of time with pleasure. This article shows that this commonly held view of passage is mistaken and that the more fundamental relationship between transformations of passage is found in fluctuations of meaning. Through explorations of boredom, ambition, and concern, this essay illustrates this connection between passage and meaning through an analysis of these feelings on what the author calls “the axis of fluidity,” a theoretical construction utilized to measure the experience of passage. The result of this essay is an assertion that fluctuations in the saturation of experience with meaning influences the feeling of passage. At the end of the work, an unresolved problem appears, and a potentially ameliorating hypothesis is offered.