Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billion dead stars whose signal light is only now reaching us, I found myself trembling with the parallel to life itself: The great paradox is that we are aflame with aliveness only as we burn through the atmosphere of now, and yet our lives are the story we constellate from the signals of bygone experience across the sky of time.

To be truly alive is to inhabit the moment not as a future memory of experience, not as a projection of the past, but as a meteor of actuality.

That is what art historian George Kubler (July 26, 1912–October 3, 1996) explores in a fragment of his wholly revelatory 1962 book The Shape of Time (public library).

Observing that “time, like mind, is not knowable as such,” that “we know time only indirectly by what happens in it: by observing change and permanence; by marking the succession of events among stable settings; and by noting the contrast of varying rates of change,” he writes:

Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events.

Yet the instant of actuality is all we ever can know directly. The rest of time emerges only in signals relayed to us at this instant by innumerable stages and by unexpected bearers. These signals are like kinetic energy stored until the moment of notice when the mass descends along some portion of its path to the center of the gravitational system… These old signals are not actual. The nature of a signal is that its message is neither here nor now, but there and then. If it is a signal it is a past action, no longer embraced by the “now” of present being. The perception of a signal happens “now,” but its impulse and its transmission happened “then.” In any event, the present instant is the plane upon which the signals of all being are projected. No other plane of duration gathers us up universally into the same instant of becoming.

We can only ever know actuality through the creaturely sensorium in the cocoon of consciousness suspended from the dying twig of the living moment, and yet part of the price of consciousness is that, in blessing us with the capacity for prospection and retorspection, it has cursed us with the compulsion to evict ourselves from the moment. Kubler writes:

To other animals who live more by instinct than do humans, the instant of actuality must seem far less brief. The rule of instinct is automatic, offering fewer choices than intelligence, with circuits that close and open unselectively. In this duration choice is so rarely present that the trajectory from past to future describes a straight line rather than the infinitely bifurcating system of human experience. The ruminant or the insect must live time more as an extended present which endures as long as the individual life, while for us, the single life contains an infinity of present instants, each with its innumerable open choices in volition and in action… The moment of actuality slips too fast by the slow, coarse net of our senses. The galaxy whose light I see now may have ceased to exist millennia ago, and by the same token men cannot fully sense any event until after it has happened, until it is history, until it is the dust and ash of that cosmic storm which we call the present, and which perpetually rages throughout creation.

Paradoxically, the key to actuality is not maximizing but minimizing the possibilities of the moment:

The instant admits only one action while the rest of possibility lies unrealized. Actuality is the eye of the storm: it is a diamond with an infinitesimal perforation through which the ingots and billets of present possibility are drawn into past events. The emptiness of actuality can be estimated by the possibilities that fail to attain realization in any instant: only when they are few can actuality seem full.

The cruelty and the kindness of time is that the moment, while leaden with the baggage of the past and the burden of the future, is the only place where our lives take shape, where the shape can be reimagined and remade. And despite all of our advances in the science of now, it may be that art remains our best means of making the moment a laboratory of the possible. Kubler observes:

Most of the time the majority of people live by borrowed ideas and upon traditional accumulations, yet at every moment the fabric is being undone and a new one is woven to replace the old, while from time to time the whole pattern shakes and quivers, settling into new shapes and figures. These processes of change are all mysterious uncharted regions where the traveler soon loses direction and stumbles in darkness. The clues to guide us are very few indeed: perhaps the jottings and sketches of architects and artists, put down in the heat of imagining a form, or the manuscript brouillons of poets and musicians, crisscrossed with erasures and corrections, are the hazy coast lines of this dark continent of the “now,” where the impress of the future is received by the past.

Couple with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, then revisit Diane Seuss’s spare, splendid poem of instruction about how not to be a prisoner of the past.