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in On Running read.

Run on.


I haven't run in a week and the energy is piling up in my body. It reaches a point where I am tightened and in need of a "catharsis." So I took a walk around the res, trying to concentrate on the music and to empty my mind, but it was so hard. Whatever I thought about, they spinned and twirled. Along the line of free association, events voluntarily came up and I could not control. I hoped I could cease my mind, seal it in a bag, and throw it into the water.

As I walked to the other side of the res, the sun was shining with a special orange light, hanging right above the trees. The people who were running glowed with a special hue - it was a nice day to run, to feel the wind but I couldn't.


A group of Jewish people in black stood along the bank, each holding a book, murmuring lines. The children stared at the other side with an innocent gaze, lost in their voices. And the gazes reminded me of an idea I developed when I was running last year, as stated in the last paragraph of my paper The Circularity Beyond the Linearity of Time:

The topology of time proposes two models of temporality - linear segment and circular cycle - that structure our existence. These two models do not exclude each other but indeed create one coherent composition in which the amplification of the circle gives line segments and the piecing together of the line segments generates a circle. Interpreting our experiences of events as line segments and the course of our life as the circle, Dasein becomes a circular progression that proceeds linearly. On the temporal horizon, Dasein stretches itself along the two directions and connects its birth and death to form a unity of its essence. This construction defines Dasein’s betweenness as a movement which gives birth to Dasein’s meaning - to make something that I am not into something that I am. The enclosed circle discloses to Dasein the possibilities in a transcendental space, in which Dasein’s repetition in the life circle runs counter-clockwise. Dasein, with the utmost courage, re-recognizes and confronts its facticity with a direct gaze, penetrating the past with its sharp projection into the future through its present imaginative recreation. As Dasein’s impressions of the re-encounters fade, the temporal horizon dissolves altogether and Dasein transcends itself to the Sartrean nothingness. “I am not who I am and I am who I am not,” Dasein speaks the impossible possibility. This transcendental Becoming is the new Being that Dasein creates and is.

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