![]() Köhler and Manguso have valuable insights about inhabiting the present, yet I also greatly anticipate the arrival of Rebecca Brown's contemplative You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe (Chatwin, $15). In her short, perceptive book Ongoingness (Graywolf, $15), Sarah Manguso wrestles with how easily an obsession with time becomes an obstruction-living in the past, preoccupied with the future: "I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn't a character flaw." Recently I was at a concert, and between band sets, the friend I was with asked me, "Do you ever think about time?" I replied: "Constantly." It's so fundamental to our existence that we consider it the fourth dimension and, yet, we do not cope with it well. ![]() affords us an embodied sense of time and its promises." Possibility can blossom in spite of itself before one moment becomes the next, but the longer a moment lasts and the more I am asked to be patient, the more it begins to feel like tension is all there is left. ![]() ![]() Seinfeld finds potential in these interstitial moments, as does essayist Andrea Köhler in her short, ruminative Passing Time (Upper West Side Philosophers, $18.95): "Waiting is an imposition. I spent the last year watching Seinfeld, famously a show "about nothing." Maybe it's the unspeakable transitionary tension of just about everything lately, but the sitcom resonated for me as, in fact, a show about waiting. ![]()
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