When perceiving the world in all of its splendor, both the beautiful and the powerful, the lack of time as a meaningful explanation begs a question of motivation. Time is not an object, it is not constructed or a process--what some may call the entropic principle is not itself time but the accumulation of disarrayed events into ever more complex structures of actualization. Time as an aesthetic is something we create and is the only thing we can know. We cannot know what 2 and 2 makes 4 is as a quantitative fact in itself even if we can recite it and it makes sense through our inductive reasoning; we can know only the aesthetics of 2 and 2 making 4, that is of a qualitative experience.
Every experience we have and feel and see was already there eternally as a single point of numb existence and we alone having the innate experience of the passage of time do we give it colour and meaning and definition. Our suffering doesn't exist outside of it but inside because we are forever aware of its movement, of its cruel and ceaseless march to the final. Suffering is a product of the incongruent reconciliation of the sentiment and the sensual, the feeling and the being, and that is what opens the world to us.
And all of those events and episodes and scenes that emerge as we encounter them are there only because we have the sense of time to locate them in a space that transcends the stage they take place on.
Why do we feel sentiment over the loss of the time? It is not because we feel the closeness of the end, but because we feel the eternal image of that point within us and it speaks to something outside, something we are alienated from, neither will nor body, but that very picture of time crystalized in that singular moment. It is why paintings move us so because they are pictures of a world existing outside of time; and why photographs and memories sadden us because we wish to live forever in that moment.
We are just the brushes of time used to create these landscapes of experience, for everyone view of a sunset or a rive or the world is another stroke that never was before but now is there forever. I think that is what has always pained me most of all. The want to hold onto those moments that time pulls away from me and to preserve them, like paintings in a gallery. But I can never have them again.