On Creativity: Time

When I took my first Philosophy courses in college, I remember thinking, “Holy crap. Other people have been thinking about this stuff, too?” (Dear Dr. David Goldberg and Dr. Lee Braver, my professors--thank you!). When I read philosophical texts, thought about them, talked about them, and listened to talks by professors, I could feel my brain responding in strange and surprising ways (twirling, or plummeting, or recoiling, or climbing the walls). I learned to read and think in new, slower ways....to try to chase down ideas in order to understand them.

I took a seminar on Heidegger’s Being and Time, which was both maddening and very enjoyable. My little joke is that they got the title wrong--(spoiler alert!); it should read Being = Time (the sequel is, of course, Being on Time).

Thinking about the way time affects us (and the way our experience of time is shaped) has long been an obsession of mine. A famous story in my family is about me on my third birthday, when I cried at my cake with a “3” candle on it, saying “Where’d my ‘2’ go?!” And my parents told me, “It went inside of you.” Maybe all artists identify with this.