Chronos: Notizbücher über Zeit

For over fifty years, from 1948 to 2000, Dragomir had recorded in six notebooks his thoughts about the nature of time, and interpreted, again and again, those texts in which Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Bergson and others discuss the question of time. He commented upon these texts and attempted to understand for himself the nature of time. Is there a conclusion to his inquiries? 'There is a primordial passing, that is not the passing of something. "Passing" implies that there is something that passes. "Passing", however, is a metaphor. No word brings to light, directly, that which I call "passing". Being is this primordial passing; and I cannot think of being without passing, or of passing without being. Time does not pass. If I say so, I think of time as a given primordial element. And it is not. It is being qua passing that makes time possible.' This is a collation of his thoughts, which he wrote down in 1987 and 1989. He did not show those notebooks to anyone, not even his philosopher friends.