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.
