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The only eternal moment, that which is both in and out of time, is the present, held always, as if hanging in limbo between the future, pregnant with possibility, and the past, as solid and already written. Because we cannot see the future, but always exist in the present because of a past that has occurred, that has already been written, we project that which we know into the future, and speak of a future destiny that is already determined – i.e., as if it has already been written.
"The soul as the place of time"
"The locus of ... time is in the immaterial soul and not in external matter".
Augustine, Husserl - The phenomenology of time.
"Inability to conceive of time in the absence of a narrative."
"To taste eternity" when one's heart is "still flitting about in the realm where things change and have a past and a future" proves futile.
"Every existant being must be either that which truly is or ontically dependent on that which truly is."
"The eternal must be immeasurable, the absolute timeless as opposed to the unendingly time-bound."
"Spacialisation of time: 'conscious duration' and 'real motion' are replaced ... by the mathematical point that has been created."
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In the end, we come to where one cannot come except by not-coming, the manner in which many have come before and others will come after. We arrive at the terminus delimited as the limit always yet to be delimited, the limit beyond which there is no limit, and hence the limit of what cannot be delimited. Death is “a phenomenon that can be phenomenalized only in its coming to pass, for outside of this passage it cannot properly be; it appears, then, only to the extent that it comes to pass; if it didn’t, it could never be. In the receding advance of the forward retreating, the inscripting of death’s erasure, truth is laid bare. Disclosing that erasure is a matter to be written from the evasiveness of the end that comes-to-be as the future that is always still-to-come, the time that is measured by difference, the deferral of meaning that can be apprehended only in and through the endless play of interpretation.
[The same could be said of birth too.
“Time,” wrote Paul Claudel, “is the way offered to all that will be to be no longer. It is the Invitation to die, for every phrase to decompose in the explicative and total concordance, to consummate the speech of adoration addressed to the ear of the Sigè the Abyss.”2 In its incessant passing, a necessary corollary to its interminable coming, time exemplifies something elementary about the nature of life as discerned from the (non)event of death, the “possibility of impossibility,” in Heidegger’s formulation.3 Human time-keeping is indebted to death as the signpost at the beginning of the end that illumines the way back to the end that was the beginning, the gathering of what will be scattered in and from the abyss of silence resounding in the sound of silence.
page 158
The sign at the end signifies that which (properly speaking) cannot be signified, the transcendent alterity opening time to eternity, not to be rendered in the Platonic sense of an immutable realm that stands over and against the temporal, but rather in the apprehension of the eternality of time and the temporality of eternity, a middle way that renders the traditional binary between evanescence and permanence obsolete.
From a semiotic perspective, the inevitability of death as the ultimate (non)event in subjectivity compels human consciousness to articulate its own limit, positing a signifier that signifies what lies beyond signification. [Which is time itself...
“The absence of a signified itself assumes the status of a signifier, disposing us to feel that behind this newly significant absence lurks a newly discovered presence.”
. . . . .
The ambiguity, the enigma.” The mark at the end is the marking of this enigma, “to think more than one thinks, to think of what withdraws from thought,” the ambivalence that blurs the ontological division of nothingness and being, the desire for the infinite that summons the “generosity of sacrifice outside the known and the unknown, without calculation, for going on to infinity. Not to be prevails as the decisive way to be. Should we have expected otherwise? Is expectation not this very coincidence of opposites, to await the return of what has never departed?