Our everyday experience leads us to believe in a world of three-dimensional space in which things change with the passage of time. The past is gone, the future has not yet arrived, and only the ever-moving present is "real." To reard the universe as a space-time continuum, the "block," is of course in a manner of speaking to stand outside history. This, we might suppose, is the essence of Borges's "mystical" experience on the street corner in Barracas. It should come as no surprise that this is also a universal feature of the philosophica perennia: what we experience as the succession of time is an abstraction rather than "reality," and "the real state of the universe is eternal or timeless"...
Floyd Merrell
Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics
Purdue University Press, 1991, p141.
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