St.Augustine:
Confessions (Book XI, Chapter 20). “I no
longer doubt that time is not more than distension; but what it is, I do not
know, and perhaps it might be easy to say that there are three times: the
present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of
things future. These three things exist in some way in the soul, and I do not
see them existing elsewhere: the present of things past is memory; the present
of things present is direct perception;
the present of things future is expectation."
As a young
boy my grandmother often quoted San Agustín. When I went to St. Edward’s the
Roman Catholic high school in Austin, I had a fine religion teacher called Brother
Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. He became my mentor and friend and even met my Rosemary
and granddaughters before he died.
Brother Edwin, my grandmother & Thomistic Theology
It was only
a few years after Brother Edwin’s class that I realized that he had not been
teaching us religion but a lofty theology. He told us, with many examples, how
St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine (he insisted on adding the Bishop of Hippo
after his name) were full-fledged philosophers.
Last year
the proof of that pudding was a program I listened to in CBC Radio’s Ideas. It
was dedicated to St. Augustine. I was floored when I learned that St.Agustine
had written that: “We listen to a note in a song in the past, then one in the
present and we can then predict the one in the future.” Of course this was
before the invention of atonal music.
The program
had me thinking of the Herodutus idea that you see something in a present that
becomes an immediate past as the object floating on river passes under a bridge.
Thanks to St. Augustine I figured out that I could run past the bridge and wait
for the object to come to a new present.
As I have
written often here, across my bed, on the opposite wall there is a framed
photograph of Rosemary. She stares at me with sad eyes. I remember that Borges
says that every first moment is followed by that same first moment in
perpetuity. I look at the portrait and I am about to press the shutter. I
imagine what I was telling her as I was about to click my Asahi Pentax S-3
shutter. She was nude. I took the photograph sometime in 1969 and I did a
series (quite conservative) from the waist up.
When I turn
off the lights at night, Rosemary is still staring at me with those sad eyes.
