At Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, New York, I teach a writing workshop called “Daily Life.” Students read poets, philosophers, essayists, and novelists, each of whom emphasizes, in one way or another, the sheer fleetingness of time. Chinese poet Tu Fu describes life as “whirling past like drunken wildfire.” Twelve hundred years later American poet James Schuyler says: “A few days / are all we have. So count them as they pass. They pass too quickly / out of breath.”
Daily life is the most available and least accessible realm. Fundamentally speaking, it’s our existence, “the what we have now” (Schuyler). But the present speeds past, flowing with such momentum that we need extreme discipline if we’re to glimpse these one-and-one-time-only moments. Of course our days seem to bear some resemblance to each other. Yet at another, deeper level, let’s say the level of the microsecond, there’s constant Heraclitean flux — phenomena that never happen twice.
