Time for one another

Byung-Chul Han’s The Scent of Time makes me want to relearn the art of lingering: to let a conversation, a piece of music or a landscape take the time it needs.

A walk or listening to a record can be worthwhile in itself. I want to make room for that time, without needing to justify it through productivity or profit.

I place that book beside Theo Angelopoulos’s The Dust of Time. The film moves through lives shaped by memory and history. Together they leave me with a question: how can time feel inhabited?

I would like to pay more attention to the life happening now.

We sometimes say life was better then. But the place we long for holds more than streets and rooms: it holds the people we knew, the person we were, and the way we remember them now.

Pavese’s The Moon and the Bonfires brings me back to the question of return. Places change, people change, and memory is fragile: some details stay with us while others fade. We change with them. Returning to a place cannot restore the life we once had there.

I place that thought beside Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia and Bergson’s idea of duration: the past continues into the present, changing who we are. Even a familiar memory meets a different version of us each time we return to it.

In Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Isak revisits scenes from his life that he cannot change. What can change is how he meets the people beside him now. That distinction matters to me: remembering can make room for another way of living, rather than leave us only with regret.

That connects with the question behind the name gigioneggiando: who are we, if even the stories we tell about ourselves keep changing?

I want to let nostalgia remind me of what I care about, and bring some of that care into the life I have now. There is still room for new places, new people, and memories we have yet to make.

The question can feel too large, as though one answer had to justify a whole life. I keep returning to a smaller one: what, or whom, am I being asked to care for today?

Nietzsche gives that uncertainty a larger scale. In The Gay Science (§§125, 343), “God is dead” names the loss of an inherited source of meaning and moral certainty. It is not a verdict that nothing matters. Nietzsche sees the danger of nihilism, but also an open horizon. I hear a difficult freedom in that: our ideals will not be handed to us fully formed. We have to shape them, live by them, and remain answerable for what they do to other people.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl writes out of his imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps. He remembers how thoughts of someone loved, work left unfinished, and responsibility towards another person could give a prisoner a reason to face the next day. The camps were a place of violence and chance; having a purpose was no guarantee of survival. That makes his testimony more demanding, and more fragile, than a simple lesson about positive thinking.

Frankl’s later account of meaning does not offer one purpose for everyone. Meaning is bound to a particular person and moment. It may be found in making something, loving someone, or, when suffering cannot be avoided, in the way one responds to it. We do not need the whole of life to become clear before we can answer something that matters now.

In Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, Domenico speaks from atop an equestrian statue in a Roman square. His call to build the pyramids, even if they are never built, asks people to imagine a future larger than the routines that keep them apart. His speech is anguished, and the scene is tragic. I hear an urgent need for a shared ideal in it, but also a question: how do we keep such an ideal connected to the people living beside us?

Byung-Chul Han takes that question towards the future in The Spirit of Hope. Fear can narrow tomorrow to one more threat to manage, until living starts to look like mere survival. Hope opens a different horizon: the possibility of acting with others towards a world we cannot yet see. It does not promise that things will turn out well. It asks us to leave room for change and to take part in it.

These are different voices. Nietzsche asks what we do when inherited ideals lose their force; Frankl draws my attention to responsibility in the present; Domenico to the need for a shared dream; Han to hope as something we can practise together. I need both scales. An ideal gives direction, while a person, a task or a small act of care gives me somewhere to begin.

In Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, the knight’s questions about death and God remain open. Yet he can still help a young family escape. I find that moving: a life can matter before its deepest questions are settled.

I want a reason to return to the world: someone to care for, a piece of work to offer, a future worth helping into being. Finding that reason is not a single revelation. Perhaps it begins each time we answer what is in front of us, and leave space for what might become possible together.

In Franco Battiato’s La cura, I hear care as a promise to attend to another person’s fragility. It makes me think about love as something we practise: listening, remembering, protecting someone’s room to grow.

That connects with the tree in The Sacrifice. Care asks us to return, to give time, to let another person matter even when there is no clear outcome to measure.

I want to become better at the ordinary forms of that promise: making time for a conversation, being present, noticing when someone needs help.

Han’s The Expulsion of the Other makes me think about what happens when everyone I encounter becomes a reflection of myself: the same opinions, the same expectations, the same familiar world.

An encounter begins when someone exceeds the picture I had of them. They may disagree with me, unsettle me, or show me something I could not have found alone.

That tension also appears in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Zosima recalls a doctor who dreams of serving humanity but can barely bear sharing a room with another person:

An idea cannot interrupt us, disagree with us, or ask us to change our plans. A person can. I want to practise the active love Zosima speaks of: caring for the person who is actually here, through those ordinary difficulties.

Listening means leaving enough room for someone else to change the conversation.

A story starts in the imagination and becomes something another person can enter. I find hope in that movement from an idea to a shared experience.

Making software gives me a different way to take part. A question becomes a tool; the tool meets people, and their experience changes the question.

I want the things I build to help people understand, make choices and find something worth their attention.

Argo and Ager are two attempts. They are also an invitation to keep learning.

I like making things and I want to do my work well. Still, I know the feeling that every quiet hour ought to become another useful hour. Even rest can start to feel like preparation for tomorrow’s work.

In Psychopolitics, Byung-Chul Han describes a form of power that no longer has to order us to produce at every turn. We learn to treat ourselves as projects to improve, and carry the demand inside us. When we cannot keep up, it is easy to blame our discipline instead of asking who set the pace and who benefits from it.

That is why I am uneasy when mindfulness or yoga is offered only as a way to manage stress and return to the same conditions ready to work harder. Both can be valuable in their own right. But care for ourselves should be more than maintenance for productivity. A problem shaped by work and society cannot be solved by each person alone.

In The Spirit of Hope, Han asks how hope can reopen a future that fear has reduced to mere survival. Hope can also move us to change our shared conditions. In The Scent of Time, he defends the art of lingering. Together, these books make me ask what kind of life work should leave possible.

I came to Denmark partly in search of a different rhythm: one in which I can leave my email alone for a whole weekend without guilt, and a parent can leave at three to pick up a child and spend the afternoon with them. Time for friends, family, a hobby, a walk or a conversation should not have to justify itself by making us more productive later.

That room to stop needs more than individual resolve. It depends on how we arrange work, care and the time we owe one another. I want to be able to stop, and to notice the small moments while they are here. That is a freedom worth making possible for more people.