Sleeplessness reveals time as a hostile, empty eternity rather than fulfilled experience

Evidence

But what is revealed in such contraction of the hours is the reverse of time fulfilled. If in the latter the power of experience breaks the spell of duration and gathers past and future into the present, in the hasteful sleepless night duration causes unendurable dread. Man’s life becomes a moment, not by suspending duration but by lapsing into nothingness, waking to its own futility in face of the bad eternity of time itself. In the clock’s over-loud ticking we hear the mockery of light-years for the span of our existence. The hours that are past as seconds before the inner sense has registered them, and sweep it away in their cataract, proclaim that like all memory our inner experience is doomed to oblivion in cosmic night. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 178

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the dilation/contraction of time in Bergson’s durée and later in Proust; also touches the same ground as Heidegger’s ‘fallen’ time and the dread of finitude. — connects to: Sublating the time form leaves an emptiness that enables imagining alternatives — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 137

Broader Connections

• Sublating the time form leaves an emptiness that enables imagining alternatives #expands (0.82) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 137