'shyku interlude' (exegesis)

Reading this I think of Wittgenstein's example of how we are tricked by language into conceiving our place in the world according to certain narrow, culturally inherited habits. Describing time in

terms of flow, in comparison to a river, etc. This is totally fallacious, says W. To illustrate his point he cites a passage from St. Augustine—time as river—which he then, I think, traces back to

Heraclitus (can’t step in it twice) and the Greeks in general. His point is funny because it's so obvious. This Is A Metaphor. We have no proof time flows or even progresses—progression,

which may just be an illusion produced by cause and effect, which might also be, or could be, David Hume, an illusion produced by the ordering mind. Time is a river, cause and effect: consonance

from chaos, gestalt. But the metaphor is totally inappropriate for another reason (and this is me talking, not W.) in that it describes something immaterial in terms of something material; and moreover,

in terms of materiality-in-movement. This is totally inaccurate because, though, yeah, a river 'progresses' and produces form from variable substance (from moving water, a shape, a river), it

is also entirely defined by its environment, by banks, obstacles to its flow, etc. A river’s shape is determined passively, reactively; as a series of responses to the run and wring of the land. Which doesn’t

resemble time in the least. First of all, time doesn’t have a shape. Secondly it is an active agent rather than a passive one, both everywhere and nowhere. Moreover our only proof of time is by

way of material rumor. By which I mean: we have always deduced the existence and persistence of time according to material responses to its effects. Time is more an aftereffect than an actual

presence. From the metamorphosis of things and the emergence, interpenetration and development of events, one from the other, we’ve deduced this abstraction descriptive of an

action, time. Which ‘passes’ (like living people into corpses). Which ‘heals all wounds’ (and produces them). Faced with patterns of emergence, growth and decay, we orient ourselves

within this idea of time and then stick to it as if such a view of things were natural and even preferable.

That’s why I like this passage from "Austerlitz". For Sebald's switch of metaphor: no, time is indeterminate and unpredictable, like weather. And like weather can't be precisely measured;

and because of that, isn’t conducive to the regulation of lives in any fixed or predictable manner. In other words, time is more a play of fluctuating patterns than a unified march. Slow here,

fast there. Contracting and expanding, according to its own internal logic.
Actually, when he switches his metaphors from river to weather I wonder whether he isn’t just

reorienting our relation to it, from an objective, material, empirically measurable event, to a subjective, psychological play of phenomena. Psychological time. Which is to say: bodily time.

Which no precision of description can catch. Since the heartbeat is not a clock, after all, nor a barometer, bridge, or ladder.