“Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom,” Bertrand Russell asserted in 1918 as he made his beautiful case for “a largeness of contemplation” in contemplating the nature of time. “Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time,” Patti Smith wrote nearly a century later in her magnificent meditation on time and transformation. As a child in Bulgaria, never having heard of either Russell or Smith, one aspect of time perplexed me to the point of obsession: In my history textbooks, dates relating to significant events or historical figures of Slavic origin were listed in pairs...
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