Remember a scene from your childhood: a movie that you saw for the first time, which made a lasting impression on you. Depending on how old you are, it might have been Gladiator, Apollo 13, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, or even something older. Try to remember how you felt watching it, who you were at the time; where you lived, how life was, how the space around you was; what kinds of thoughts you had at that age, what kind of hopes. Hold that thought. Let’s talk about the timelessness of that experience.
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.
