For the longest time I thought that unravelling the paradoxical nature of the now, understanding how it could be at once the same now and yet a different now entirely, was the key to resolving the problem of meaning and experience. The reason for this turned on my early philosophical love affair with Jacques Derrida, the famed French post-structuralist philosopher, who was very fond of writing passages such this tidbit from “Differance”:

An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and singularly substance or the subject. In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is…