# Objective Becoming Searchable **Opening (not a real abstract):** As Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood begins, all the townspeople are asleep but we are awake. We hear the dew falling and the "invisible starfall" and the "darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab- filled sea." Then the First Voice, who narrates the opening, says: "Time passes. Listen. Time passes." It is a moment of great anticipation. Immersed in the world of the play it is natural to ask, What is coming? But a philosopher who holds himself outside of the world of the play may ask a different question. He may ask, Just what is this process-the passage of timethat (supposedly) goes on as we listen? We often reach for metaphors when we describe the passage of time. We say that events are carried along by the passage of time from the future into the past, like sticks and leaves floating on a river. Or we say that we move through time **Authors:** [[Bradford Skow]]