Sometime ago I read an article about working conditions in Finland (that developed, modern, free Nordic country). It described how utterly depressed Finnish workers are, being forced to chase income in second or third part-time jobs, then returning home exhausted and crying. Needless to say, try to imagine the situation in places like the USA. No free time, only work. What’s the ideological connection between work and free time? Let’s take a closer look at systems that valorize and promote work versus free time, to get a better feel of the situation.
“It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it”
I don’t want to reveal my exact age, but I am not young. I am not old, either – although, perhaps this latter claim would automatically categorize me as old. In any case, I am at an age where I can look back and have a concept of nostalgia, of memories, of childhood.
I also have an uncannily good memory – which is a blessing for a writer. This memory is in fact multi-layered: Not only do I remember the past, but I remember myself in the past thinking about the past.
The place I spent most of my summers as a kid. But nostalgia is neither about the place, nor about me being a kid.
Note: this article is based on my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.
What Is the Eternal Now
Arthur Schopenhauer states in his 1818 The World as Will and Representation that “[the present], empirically apprehended, is the most fleeting of all … [It] constantly becomes and passes away, in that it either has been already or is still to come” (Schopenhauer 1969, 279).
The metaphysical spectrality of this undefinably small present, this malleable here-and-now, seems to exist in a conflicting relationship with the sheer weight of reality it seems to carry. Human consciousness possesses epistemological access to the present that is uniquely more reliable than that of the past or the future.
The reason is that these “contain mere concepts and phantasms … The present alone is that which always exists” (Schopenhauer 1969, 279). I refer to this present, the borders of which are ambiguous, as the eternal now or the eternal present.
