# For Now, For the Time Being ## Letters on Langweile **[[Ans Mertens]]** & **Nick Young** Antwerp, May 15th, 2019 Dear Nick, I have been looking forward to this correspondence with you – to share this composition of thoughts on, and experiences of, time flowing. Do you remember your moments of lingering? Curious as I am, I am looking forward to the insights, nuances and contrasts you are about to add to my records of time passing, to this pallet of time captures. Today I feel summer is approaching \- the sun is shining into my small rooftop studio and feels warm on my skin. It is late afternoon. As the days get longer, I have many hours left before sunset when I want to finish this first letter to you. So far, I cannot prevent my mind from lingering on last summer’s morning swim at the Atlantic Coast near Bilbao. This twenty minutes dive during sunrise into the chilly water of the ocean is just one of the many images I recollect of last summer’s road trip. To reach this idyllic beach I have spent hours, nearly days, driving all the way down from Antwerp to Northern Spain. Remarkably enough, when I recall these hours they barely seem longer than the short swim while the sun was rising above the horizon. Of course, travelling South for twenty minutes wouldn’t have dropped me at the Atlantic Coast at all, but somewhere in the outskirts of Antwerp. So, where did these hours bring me? In the late 19th century William James noted: “In general a time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing but in retrospect short.” Today this phenomenon is referred to as the holiday paradox; one hour of waiting for the train feels endless when we are standing on the platform, but radically short finally back home. Let me invite you right there again, on the platform or if you want, in my car or in my writing room. Many hours of our lifetime are spent waiting, travelling or lingering. I dare to state that these hours by far outnumber the moments we consciously recollect. These ‘long moments’ of *Langweile* pass unbearably slow, but barely leave any trace. In our current experience-driven society these long moments are reduced to a minimum and avoided if possible: travel faster, do more, be more productive. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, “Human life is impoverished when all forms off in-betweens are removed from it.” *Langweile* or boredom is the existential feeling of time passing. In-between moments like waiting make us feel uncomfortable and detached from our destination. Nevertheless, they are essential for human thinking. Meanwhile on the platform (alias writing desk), while time is passing painfully slow, a lot of things do happen. Apart from swimming the Atlantic, I imagined myself at the Mediterranean coast where I will travel to this coming summer. Sequences of texts that I have been reading pass by, along with memories. And I imagine this letter sent, received and responded to. When one perceives these thoughts carefully, an associative time-space of past and future events unfolds. These long, untraceable hours, can give us an insight into the human condition of mentally time travelling. “Lingering presupposes a gathering of the senses,” writes Han. “Leisure (…) does not serve the purpose of distraction, but of collecting oneself.” With ‘leisure’ Han is referring to the Ancient Greek *scholè*, a time-space free of compulsion, necessities or care. Isn’t this the time-space we are entering in those in-between moments? Although there is a clear goal – arrive at home, dive into the ocean or finish these writings – before we reach our destination for a brief moment we are discharged from our duties and productivity. I would like to invite you to a last space that does not differ that much from the platform, car or writing room. Let us enter the cinema theatre. I have to admit I am not inviting you for a Hollywood production. What I am picturing is a slow recount of rather unspectacular events; passengers at a square, spectators of a football game, a friend making piano music, a landscape. Abbas Kiarostami wrote: “I believe in a type of cinema that gives greater possibilities and time to its audience. A half-created cinema, an unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience (…).” An ‘unfinished’ cinema creates a cinematic time-space as a free zone for travelling back and forth associatively. Right there, I would like to meet. Discharged from care, scholè – experienced on the platform, the car, writing room or in the theatre – is a time-space to reflect, imagine and create. The long hours of Langweile that are easily forgotten leave one mark for sure: a sign of our human existence. Hours of thinking, of mental time travelling, have projected humanity beyond its individual lifespan, writes Dean Buonomano, and “passed knowledge between individuals who will never stand face to face.” A cinema of lingering not only passes the experience of time flowing to the spectator, it also recollects the untraced ‘in-between’ hours that our memory is failing to capture. Rhetorically I will leave you with this question; isn’t lingering essential to the human condition? I am looking forward to reading your retrospective and prospective thoughts, With warm regards, Ans Milano, May 23rd, 2019 Dear Ans, Many of the times that are important to us, your swim in the sea for example, we enjoy because when they occurred we were *not* mentally time travelling, our focus was on what we were experiencing (the chill of the sea, for example) in that moment. Mental time travel allows us to untether ourselves from now so as to go forward or back. Why don’t we stay put in the present? Animals, (and me on my phone) might be stuck in the present, but it does not seem that they are *appreciating* it: rabbits might like to eat carrots, but I have trouble believing that as they chew they are savouring the taste. Our senses present us with the “blooming, buzzing confusion” (to take another famous line from William James) of the world. Why not revel in it? Thank you for your message. It’s great to have the opportunity to hear from someone who thinks about time and how it shapes us. Even better when it is someone who creates art, rather than a dry, logic-crunching philosopher. You’ve made me think about boredom, and in particular how there seem to be far fewer moments of Langweile in my life than there was when I was a child. If I allow my mind to take me back to when I was very young, I remember boredom being something I felt all the time.  I would trail around the house after my mother whining “I don’t know what to *do*”, and infuriating her by dismissing any and all suggestions she made as to what I *could* do. Now, I almost always know what to do, or rather now there is almost always something I should do, or could do: most days are filled with work and thoughts about work, or friends, or the admin that comes with having a life. I confess that I am also afflicted with that most common 21st century malady: the compulsion to stare at, and listlessly tap upon, my phone or laptop.  Often I fill my in-between moments bouncing between screens, gorging myself on content. If I consider why I do this, where this restlessness comes from, I think there is something inside of me, imploring me, *don’t waste time*:  if life is not filled with productivity, or at least having some stream of information being poured into it, then it is not really being lived at all. This is \-obviously- a path to madness, but the voice is insistent. This same voice is probably driven by an urge to avoid the discomfort of waiting, a desire to outrun those moments of nothingness where I have nothing but my own thoughts churning away. Because of this aversion, most of the times when I really am doing nothing are not chosen, but forced upon me. Chiefly, they come at night. I am a terrible sleeper –and I write this bleary and hollow eyed after another night lying awake. At these moments scholè does not arrive easily: I don’t reminisce but regret, I don’t anticipate but fret. Aristotle thought that animals were “stuck in time”: the minds of people might allow for time travel, but creatures can’t see beyond the horizon of their present. I am sometimes tempted to think that they have the better deal. There must be something wonderful about simply, unthinkingly, *being*; the urge to fill time with work, worry, and screens might be an attempt \-a bad one- to get back to this unreflective animal state. So can this be escaped? How can I collect rather than scatter- myself? One possibility, one I suspect you are drawn to, is to reminisce about happy moments (as a matter a fact I was in the North of Spain last summer too), and to imagine the good times to come. This definitely has some merit but the danger here is that when it comes to mental time travel, navigation is not an exact science: on the way to happy a memory I run the risk of slipping off the road and finding myself back at moments I’d rather forget or within a terrible anticipated future. It is probably good to face these moments once in a while. Lingering might be essential to the human condition but no one ever said that the human condition was supposed to be *fun*. However, here’s another potential escape hatch, and it’s going to sound like an Instagram cliche at first, but bare with me. Maybe the way to find moments of scholè is to focus on our experience of the *now.* As a matter a fact many physicists would say that there is no such thing as time passing and no such thing as a true now: all of time exists at once: while there are earlier and later moments in the same way that there are higher and lower spaces, there is no true now, in the same way that there is no one absolute *here*. A question philosophers like me, ones interested in perception and experience, find interesting is why, if time does not *actually* pass, does it *seem* to. There are a lot of different suggestions as to how we might do this, more important for me is whether the phenomenology of time passing, of nowness, can help us in finding more moments of scholè. While I am attracted to this idea, I worry that things are not quite as simple as this. First of all, trying to focus on nowness is difficult. It doesn’t take much for our minds to frogmarch us back to the future or the past. Second, I worry that if we focus only on the present then perhaps we lose something important. There is a danger that embracing nowness and nothing more, would turn us into aesthetic zombies, consuming experience but not considering it. I think the half-finished cinema that you mentioned brings this out rather well. Part of what I think makes this type of art valuable is that it forces the viewer to focus on the present. We do not typically attend to our experience of commuters or sports crowds, but we do when we are sat in the cinema and a film forces us to. On the other hand, the audience is not only experiencing, but completing the work, creating the other half of something half-finished. And, it seems to me, they are doing this by allowing the film to spark thoughts and feelings, to take them somewhere else, or somewhen else.  It seems the same is true of life outside the cinema: being and feeling present seems essential to the human condition, but it seems like a waste of a mind not to let it wander. Once it wanders through, we can’t guarantee it will lead us somewhere nice. So, this is where I’m at. Tempted to throw myself into nowness, but not sure that is something I am capable of doing, and concerned that even, if I could, I would be leaving something important behind. Do you think I should man up, embrace the sleepless nights, and accept that while lingering is part of the human condition it is not always going to be very pleasant?  And where does art come into all of this? It seems to me that art seems to hit the sweet spot between being in the here and now, and allowing for drift and contemplation. Do you think cinema is uniquely good at this, or is this something that all good art should do? Looking forward to your reply, Nick Antwerp. June 11th, 2019 Dear Nick, You ended your writings with the poetical reflection whether film, or art in general, could hit the sweet spot between being in the now and letting the mind wander. I am tempted to approve this statement. You won’t be surprised when I add that this is the vibrating zone I am trying to grasp within my work. Nevertheless, I doubt that all art is aiming to invite its spectator into this zone between being and reflecting, nor that only art can hit this spot. Your elaboration on nowness kept me thinking. Like you mention, there are many moments when we forget about time and are absorbed into the now. Indeed, I recall happy moments like the sunset swim, or – the other extreme \- being lost in time *surfing* the web and scrolling through images. Yet, I have the presumption that there is a radical difference between the experience of presence as an in-between state and the experience of nowness as such. Let me *dive* into this thought experiment with you. I remember an oil painting of a forest lane by a talented, but unknown painter. The painting depicts a dust road in a forest. The sun shines through the leaves of the birches. It must be summer. The scene is familiar: a Flemish forest alley leading nowhere. The road bends outside of the frame. In its curve, a blank wall suggests a random building. It could be that the painter has an emotional connection with the street he depicted. Even so, he captured a scene we often see, but that we are rarely perceive attentively. The dullness of the street leading to a blank wall isn’t a setting one recalls. Nonetheless, the absence of depicted events invites the viewer to wander the alley along the blank wall, past the curve – beyond the frame. Likewise, the experimental writer Georges Perec described the atmosphere of the busy Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris in a beautiful attentive summary; “An 86 passes by. A 70 passes by. Some cars drive into the parking lot. A 63 passes by. An 87 passes by. It is five after one. A women is running across the square in front of the church (…)”. In 70 pages he captures, “that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than *le temps ( alternately translated as ‘time’ or ‘weather’)*, people, car and clouds.” Within defined timeframes Perec collected common movements and details present at busy Parisian square. While Perec is recounting casual “nows”, time is passing ànd extending the timeframe he set up. Like the unheard of painter of the alley, Perec defines a framework excluding happenings-worth-mentioning and lowers the threshold of what he and his reader perceive. What I am trying to outline is the following: beyond the absorption in the now that one experiences in the excess of stimuli and craving for impulses, lies an experience of the now appearing like a pause or interval. This kind of being-in-the-now is no longer losing track of time, but an awareness of its passing. In other words: one experiences time flowing beyond the borders of the present moment – the now extends towards the past and future. What rests is the negative, an absence,a time interval – a *moment that lasts forever*. It is tempting to immerse oneself in the flow – *the current* – of events. Surrendered to the positive stream of information – screens, screens, screens – intervals between, or absences from information are rare. Each impulse introduces the next one, to catch the next *wave* and activates an endless sequence of information to process. Byung Chul-Han compares the alert, distracted mind to the watchfulness of animals scanning their environment for danger. Being stuck into nowness, it is impossible to think beyond the horizon of the present moment. Following the reasoning of Han, devoting oneself to screens and distractions is indeed undermining our human capability of thinking beyond the limits of our short existence. This is where I am at: an in-between moment, an interval or pause is an absence. Like silence is the experience of an absence of sounds, the time interval is an experience of an absence of happenings. It is a negative time-space, shaped and framed by positive events and/or information. What film or art can do – but not necessarily could or should do – is to set the viewpoint, choose a perspective and lower the threshold of our attention to detail. Guided by the edges of the frame, the spectator is invited to observe the absence – becoming a presence – and to move mentally beyond the edges of the given frame. This multiple perspective of both detailed observation \- or absorption \- as well as the awareness of one’s limited point of view hits, to my belief, what you called earlier the sweet spot of being in the now, while letting the mind wander away from it. Let me share with you this last image, as an epilogue to my thoughts on absence. About ten days ago, I fell asleep after being briefly awake around sunrise. The light had woken me, but I had a few hours of sleep left before my alarm would wake me up for work. In the dream that followed I was lost in time, literally. I felt uneasy because I needed to leave somewhere (I don’t know where) and was trying to find out the hour of the day when I noticed all the clocks and watches around me were broken. Some of the clocks were just blinking random numbers, others would uncannily display “99:99”. Rather desperate, I tried to determine the hour by reading the light, but both the cloudiness as well as my inexperience played tricks on me and I started to belief the passage of time stopped. What strikes me now is that in the absence of time I failed to live and act – although I was able to *move* my body, I wasn’t able to *move on*. While we don’t need watches in order to live, they organize our life. Can I write accordingly that although we don’t need to *know* the time in order to live, we need the *experience* its passage to give meaning to our existence? And to reach back to where we started our conversation: do we need things to happen in order to experience our living; or is the interval, the pause or the moment of Langweile recalling our purpose of existence? I am looking forward to reading your thoughts, Ans Milano, July 7th, 2019 Dear Ans, It has taken me a while to properly consider the questions you raised. I want to focus on two things you mentioned that have stuck with me: the relation between dreams and the experience of time passing, and how the idea of time stopping, might help get me closer to understanding precisely what Langweile *is*. In doing so, I hope to sneak up, or at least circle around, the questions you ended with concerning the relative importance of experiencing happenings and experiencing absences. Let’s start with dreams. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that dreams are uniquely *unsuited* for the appreciation of time passing. First, in dreams temporality twists and warps: one moment we are doing *this* *here*, the next we are doing *that* *there*. With no real sense of how long we have been doing this or that, or how we got from here to there. I used to think that dreams were something like inner movies that we show to ourselves, but now I don’t think that’s right at all. While a film can play with time –slowing it down or speeding it up, messing  with the sequence in which events are presented– there is still a clear order of temporal relations: first the viewer is presented with one thing, then presented with another and another. Dreams have no such through-line.  Second, dreams  are so crammed with events that in-between moments never occur. When we dream, things happen, keep happening, and don’t stop happening until the dream is over. There are no absences to enjoy and so no moments in which to linger. While thoughts might arise in dreams –like your worry that time had stopped– it doesn’t seem to me that we ever really *contemplate* anything. A stream of dream consciousness runs so quickly that any idea we have just gets washed along with everything else. Maybe dreams are more like stories we tell ourselves than films? A dream without occurrences seems to me as impossible as a story without words. So, I put it to you. While dreams might provide us with other types of insight, about what drives us and what we fear, they do not allow for lingering or experiencing time, and so tell us nothing about ourselves as temporal beings.  With this in mind, I now want to try to find my way to the other end of the continuum: what is the best state of mind in which to experience Langweile?  This might be a fool’s errand, but perhaps it will help me get some way towards answering the questions you asked me. I also hope to put a bit of pressure on you to really define what Langweile and why it is important. My approach will be to indulge in the philosopher’s habit of taking an idea and slicing it up as finely as I’m able to. This might lead to insight, or it might lead to me cutting away something important by accident. Please tell me if you think that I have done.  Let’s start with one of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories “The Secret Miracle”. Here, like in your dream, time stops. The story involves a jewish writer, Jaromir Hladik, who, while waiting to face a Nazi firing squad prays to God for one more year to finish a play he is writing. The next morning, God grants his request. At the moment that the firing squad aims its rifles, the passing of time is suspended: the men before him freeze, the smoke from Hladik’s last cigarette hangs in the air. He is paralyised, but his thoughts are not. He spends a year in this state finishing his play, and as soon as he completes it, time resumes, the shots are fired, and Hladik dies. Would you say that Hladik is experiencing a year long period of Langweile? He still experiences the world –seeing the frozen men before him and feeling the raindrop that has landed on his face– but nothing is *happening* out there, and he now has time (a lot of time) to focus on and think about every detail of what his senses present. Indeed, he uses the expression on one of the faces of his murderers as inspiration for one of the characters in his play. We might think of it as the exact opposite of a dreamstate: nothing happens, time is linear, thoughts are clear and proceed at a leisurely pace. This example also seems to fit with a lot of the things you have told me about in-between moments and their benefits. First, Hladik is experiencing an absence of events, second, he has the opportunity to focus on what would otherwise be inconsequential aspects of the scene, and third, in finishing his work, he is making plenty of mental movements outside of his present experiential ‘frame’. I’m interested in whether you think all three of these elements are essential for Langweile. I’m going to do this by slowly subtracting aspects of his experience and inviting you to tell me whether you would think Hladik’s experiencing the passage of time would be purer or duller as a result.  First, imagine that God, with the intention of minimising distraction, discreetly switches off, one by one, all of Hladik’s sensory faculties. First his sense of touch, then hearing, then sight etc. When this process is complete Hladik would find himself with no sense whatsoever of the world around him. He wouldn’t even, it seems to me, experience darkness (as darkness seems like an absence that we can see). This modification of the story is inspired by a thought experiment from a philosopher called Austin Clark, who uses a story like this to argue that consciousness can exist in the absence of sentience. This seems right, Hladik would still be a conscious being, just one that is cut off from anything other than itself. In your opinion, would Hladik be in a better or worse position to experience Langweile in this new state? Although he is not experiencing the world, he still able to move mentally, to compose and contemplate. Moreover, it seems to me that he is still experiencing an absence: having one’s sensory faculties switched off would, it seems to me, be felt strongly, in the same way that the silence at the end of a symphony can be deafening.  We can go one step further still. Imagine that sense-less Hladik sometimes takes periods of rest from his work. Intervals in which he is not thinking about his play, his life, his God, nor anything else. No inner monologue echoing in his head, no images dancing before his mind’s eye. This is where things get tricky for me. On the one hand, we might think that consciousness which is entirely empty ceases to be consciousness at all: when Hladik stops thinking, he isn’t feeling the drift of time or nearing existential answers, he’s just taking a nap. On the other hand we might think Hladik has reached the purest state of Langweile possible. After all, mental movement is still *movement*. The voice or pictures in our heads are still events, just mental occurrences rather than occurrences ‘out there’. They’re sensuous too: hearing a real life voice or feeling a real life raindrop are qualitative experiences, but so too are imaginings of voices and raindrops. As we have touched on before, a chattering mind can distract just as much as a bustling world. Perhaps consciousness *without* thought or feeling the best way of feeling time passing? A philosopher called Brian O’Shaughnessey suggested that an essential feature of consciousness is that it is constantly *renewing*, with a fresh instant of itself arriving at every moment. Perhaps that is what Hladik would appreciate in these quietest of quiet moments, an experience of his empty consciousness restoring itself over and over.  Part of me wants to say that this is as close as we can get to experiencing the passing of time, but I suspect you will think I have gone too far, and lost something important along the way. I think, at root, we might disagree on the importance of contemplation in moments of Langweile. I take your point that there is a difference between the experience of presence as an in-between state and the experience of nowness as such, but I think that *experience* of time passing, as in my stripped down version of Borges’ story, is perhaps more important to understanding our relation to time than mental movement. My worry is *what sorts* of mental moves are the right ones to make? Is it simply thinking about time, and myself, and time passing? Is it thinking about the small events taking place? What makes thoughts like these more valuable than the more mundane thoughts that flutter through our heads every day? Let me know what you think, Nick Antwerp, August 2nd, 2019\. Dear Nick, Your last writings are challenging my ideas on Langweile and its value. Allow me to linger a bit longer by sharing an anecdote with you to drape duration on. To mark the time that passes in between our conversations.  Yesterday, I have been enjoying the late afternoon sun at the docks of the old Antwerp harbour reading John Steinbeck’s *East of Eden*, my holiday lecture. The lazy long moments of holiday reading are not remembered in its duration. However, this beautiful fragment marked my afternoon experience and shifted my thoughts into a new direction: *“Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy – that’s the time that seems long in memory. And this right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”* When nothing happens – or when we don’t sense anything – time stops, but our consciousness continues. In routine time or eventless time our thoughts linger like in moments of joy or tragedy. Yet, when we are lacking these moments to drape our thoughts on, these thoughts remain invisible and forgotten, or have never existed. On Monday I leave for Italy, promising me long, during moments of driving, reading and thinking with an occasional swim in between. Liberated from worldly worries, time will stop. Like Hladik being temporarily liberated from his sentence, I will collect and refine my thoughts before crystalizing them into words and materializing them on paper. The latter is important; to pin down lasting thoughts through the transient act of writing. This in-between letter is another attempt to trace down our lingering moments of thoughts that are shaping and shifting, expanding and folding. This raises the question whether the experience of time in the present moment is bringing us to a better understanding of time, or does the imperfect memory of time and its according duration actually keeps us away from it? Let me now dive into time stretched to boredom before I share you my findings on Langweile more precisely on my return. Enjoy the sun, Ans Milano, September 17th, 2019 Dear Ans, The Steinbeck quote, along with your thoughts on it, have been rolling around in my head for a few weeks now. In particular I have been thinking about the differences remembering events outside of ourselves and remembering those that occur within us. I think there is something exactly right about the idea that our memories of eventless times are truncated, but what I find particularly intriguing is that even when our inner lives do take a turn towards the dramatic, when there are plenty of exciting mental events, these thoughts slip out of memory too.   As we have talked about in previous correspondence, in-between times can be important, and they can be important because they allow for our thoughts to wander and stretch themselves out, and so find themselves in places they wouldn’t otherwise be. It seems right to say that a wandering mind can bring me joy or despair no less than events in the world outside of me. Inner lingering provides plenty in the way of realisation and revelation. I’m not sure if I would say that thoughts in these sorts of situations are invisible, and I do not think you would either, but I do think that when it comes to remembering, these inner moments differ significantly from outer ones. One of the events in my life that has made me happiest these last few months was the wedding of a close friend, and I can recall the day quite well: how the bride and groom looked as they gave their vows; eating, drinking, and laughing with friends at the reception. There have also been times this summer in which simply thinking has brought me just as much joy: realising my feelings for someone, deciding that the future will bring more light than dark. But my memories of these inner episodes are far less vivid than those of the world outside myself. I can recall *that* my thoughts unveiled something new to me, and *that* I was optimistic, and even where I was when I had these experiences. But I can’t recollect the sequences of images, words and feelings that brought me to that point with anything like the same detail that I can remember the bride’s dress, or throwing confetti outside Felix Pakhuis. It’s an interesting question as to why this is. The inner seems just as vivid when it is occurring as the outer, but, as with dreams, thinking evaporates fast. Perhaps, like dreams, thoughts are woven together so loosely that, unless we are careful, they quickly fall apart quickly. We can think in words, but also images and mental feelings, such as the ‘click’ of suddenly understand something. But all of these come in a muddle, looping over one another and tangling up, fighting for the foreground. We can be following one thoughtful trail and suddenly realise that an ear worm has been playing in the back of the mind for many minutes. The world is full of concrete things, corporeal props over which to drape joy or sadness, and that, maybe, is why these events can be returned to in memory more easily: our feelings are just where we left them. Trying to do the same with the mind's ephemera on the other hand, is like throwing silk into the wind. This is certainly no reason to think that mindful moments are less valuable than worldly ones. Victories or tragedies on the inside can shape us just as much as those on the outside, even if they leave less of a mark on memory. What’s more, perhaps the fact that thoughts are fleeting gives them a value that real life experiences lack? Over the course of our correspondence, one of the things we have talked about is the merit of being present, of experiencing now. What better example of this is there than the thoughts which we catch but then straight away slip through our fingers?  I have very much enjoyed corresponding with you, and although some of the thoughts you have inspired have floated away by now, I am happy that we have pinned down a few of them through writing this text together.  Many thanks for all of this, Nick * Antwerp, September 23rd * * Dear Nick * * * Zooming in on the questions and ideas that we have collected through our correspondence has placed each of them upon an exponential curve, saturating my mind with new thoughts, ideas and more questions. It is true that many of them evaporated already before I was even able to find the right words to trace them, let alone to pass them along. I share your relief that we at least caught a few of them in our writings. * * Your last letter grasped something essential for me: the perception of the outer world is in no way different from the perception of our inner world, yet our memory of it is. The amount of tools that have extended, altered, fragmented, measured and documented our perceptions of the outer world, seem to be useless to approach our inner thoughts. Steinbeck wrote that we need posts to drape duration on; counting time is a convenient method to do this too. But there exists a time gap between the counting digits of clock that seemingly guide us along the stream of time – *time didn’t stop happening*. I believe right there hides a method for perceiving our inner world more precisely. In an attempt to grasp my lingering mind the soft bells of a meditation sound track help me to frame my thoughts. Like the digits of the clock, those bells mark an interval – as opposed to clocks that tend to minimize this gap, the interval of the bell is extended and stretched out widely and so invites me towards internal observation. * * Cinema consists of intervals as well. Instead of trying to capture the interval between images, Carlos Reygadas enlarged the space between the frames to grasp the cosmological movements of the Earth in a sublime time-lapse that became the opening-shot for *Stellet Licht.* About an hour at sunrise in real-time becomes a cinematic time experience of six minutes of stars turning around the polestar and blending into the shifting colours of a mesmerizing sunrise. Although Reygadas accelerated the golden hour, the sequence unfolds slowly. The sounds of the wakening Steppe (in real-time), the expressive colours of a sunrise (fastened) combined with a slow camera movement create an experience of time that by far reaches beyond the duration of the six minutes sequence and situates us, observers, into the universe. And as the accelerated scene becomes an experience of delay, the spectator becomes observer of both the scene and his wandering mind that lifts him beyond the limits of his short existence. * * You asked me to define what Langweile means to me and why it would be important. Langweile occurs when we are waiting for the long during moment to end – the train that arrives, the meditation bell that rings, a new creative insight that occurs in Hladik’s mind, or the bullet that pierces his head. Langweile is not the absence of happenings, but rather the absence of a time-liberating event staying out of reach. *It feels like nothing is happening for a long time and we cannot escape.* Considering that eventlessness, like silence, is non-existent, Langweile is *caused* by a friction between the pace of succeeding events and the threshold of our experience of them. The technique of cinema – of images and intervals – can alter our attention and senses. I think that the evocation of duration through cinema is a possible tool to explore emptiness and the potential it contains. * * This last summer, I have filmed contemplative scenes of nature captured on Kodachrome film. Twenty-second-shots capture men walking at the Heath of Kalmthout. Considering the contrast and colours on pellicule, as well as the rough nature of the heather, *Sunday* flirts with Romantic painting. The duration of each shot as well as the absence of actions within the shots are an easy invitation to wandering thoughts. Occasionally my camera makes a fast pan, reframing the shot. This unexpected movement is an attempt to (re)situate us – observers – within the concrete world and within the deep jungle of our mind. The camera-pan sets a mark, but leaves us alone to move on freely within the expanded frame. * * The feeling of being subject to the passage of time is uncomfortable to most of us. Acceleration is one method to alter this feeling into a feeling of autonomy, control and direction. It is true that the feeling of time passing probably is replaced by the feeling of events occurring \- a shift from the feeling of being lived to the feeling of living. Yet, any pause, will amplify our failing resistance to the passage of time. Nonetheless, I have the feeling there is a zone where we can operate more freely. In becoming familiar with boredom or *free* time empty of events, we learn how to linger and hesitate. Lingering is an escaping method too, but one that asks for an active redirection of our thoughts and actions. Lingering addresses the creative capacity of the mind: the ability to lower the threshold of our impulses, to shift focus, to alter our perception. Langweile *is* a friction that adds texture to our experience of time and the perception of our surroundings. I think that being able to be bored makes us more capable and resilient to deal with free time and therefore more free and creative beings. * * I must admit that my attraction towards long and empty moment finds its origin in my struggle to feel free within these moments. Paradoxically, my artistic practice needs a free zone to linger, but is also affected by my distracted and doubting mind that sometimes behaves too freely within this open space. I long for emptiness and the potential that it inhabits, but the field is vulnerable. My attempt, within that vulnerability, is to transmit fragments of free zones to my spectators. As if I were sharing a fraction of the free moments I collect with you and also you, reader of our correspondence, so as to make a space in which to linger in every direction, to discover different paths and textures. * * Dear Nick, I have deeply enjoyed our season of writing together. I believe that the time capture of thoughts that we made is not a *still life* or *nature morte,* but a field for new thoughts to emerge when we are rereading our correspondence or when we share our letters with new receivers. Thank you very much too. * * With warm regards, * * * Ans * *Between May and September 2019, visual artist and filmmaker Ans Mertens corresponded with philosopher Nick Young (Università degli Studi di Milano Statale) to investigate the experience of Langweile and the importance of recollecting empty moments.* **listed writings** **Borges, Jorge Luis.** 1962 "The secret miracle." in *Labyrinths: Selected stories and Other Writings*, New Directions Press, 2007 **Buonomano, Dean.** 2017\. *Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time.* New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. **Clark, Austin.** 2000\. *A theory of sentience*. Clarendon Press. **Han, Byung-Chul.** 2009\. *The Scent of Time*. Translated from German to English by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2017\. **James, William**. 1890\. “The Perception of Time.” in *The Principles of Psychology.* Retrieved from: https://genius.com/William-james-chapter-xv-1-the-perception-of-time-annotated **Kiarostami, Abbas.** 1995\. *An Unfinished Cinema.* Retrieved from https://www.sabzian.be/article/an-unfinished-cinema **O'Shaughnessy, Brian**. 2003\. *Consciousness and the World*. Oxford University Press. **Perec, Georges.** 1975\. *An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris.* Translated from French to English by Marc Lowenthal. Cambridge: Wakefield Press. 2010\. **Steinbeck, John.** 1952\. *East of Eden.* London: Penguin Books. **listed film works** **Stellet Licht.** *Dir. Reygadas, Carlos.* 2007\. Mexico/France/Netherlands. Film. **Sunday.** *Dir. Mertens, Ans*. 2019\. Belgium. Film