it is an anachronistic reductio ad absurdum of a preterite system or, what is worse, the feeble artifice of an Argentinian gone astray in the maze of metaphysics

A word on the title: I am not oblivious of the fact that it is an example of the monster the logicians call contradictio in adjecto, for to say that a refutation of time is new (or old, for that matter) is to attribute to it a temporal predicate, thus restoring at once the very notion the subject strives to destroy. Still and all I shall let it stand, so that its ever-so- slight mockery give proof that I do not overrate the importance of this play on words. And then, too, our language is so thoroughly saturated and animated with the notion of time that quite possibly not a single sentence in all these pages fails to require or invoke it.

In the course of a life dedicated to belles-lettres and, occasionally, to the perplexities of metaphysics, I have glimpsed or foreseen a refutation of time

I have here accumulated citations from the apologists of idealism, I have been prodigal with passages from their canon, I have been reiterative and explicit, I have censured Schopenhauer (not without ingratitude), all so that my reader may gradually penetrate this unstable world of the mind: a world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective; a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of the Principia; an indefatigable labyrinth, a chaos, a dream. It was to this almost perfect disintegration that David Hume was led.

The Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” is thus invalidated: to say I think is to postulate the I, and is a petitio principii.

“I stood looking at this simple scene. I thought, out loud most probably: ‘It's the same as it was thirty years ago. . . .’ I thought back to that date: a recent enough time in other countries, but already a remote one in this fast-changing part of the world. Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for it a small, close affection, a bird-size affection; but most probably there was no other sound in this vertiginous silence than the equally timeless sound of the crickets. The facile thought I am in eighteen hundred and . . . ceased being a set of approximate words and deepened into a reality. I felt dead, I felt myself an abstract perceiver of the world; I felt an indefinite fear imbued with science, the clearest metaphysics. I did not believe I had gone upstream on the presumed Waters of Time. No. Rather, I suspected I was in possession of the reticent or absent sense of the inconceivable word eternity. Only later did I succeed in defining this piece of imagination.