I’ve been feeling like time is flying by, and the internet exacerbates that. But it wasn’t until I read Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Self-Portrait Abroad that I was able to understand exactly how extensive the feeling is, how physical:
This wasn’t the first time I’d seen a place I’d frequented in the past disappear in this way, the transformation of a location I’d known….I realized that time had passed since I’d left Kyoto.
Until then, the feeling of being carried along by time had always been attenuated by the fact that I wrote–until then, in a way, writing had been a means of resisting the current that bore me along, a way of inscribing myself in time, of setting landmarks in the immateriality of its flow, incisions, scratches. (84)
