On Definitions and the Nature of Identification

To define is to draw a circle in the sand and pretend the sea will honor it. We carve lines where being spills, we name what shifts, we say: “this is that,” and hope the world will agree. But it never fully does. Language reaches, but never holds. Behind every definition stands the uneasy shadow of the undefined.

There are two mirrors we hold up to a concept: the extensional and the intensional. The first is outward, the second inward. Extension is the gesture of listing, of gathering particulars under a banner – triangle means this shape, and that one, and the one etched on the classroom board, and the one in Euclid’s ghost. It collects, accumulates, counts. It says: show me the instances. And in their sum, I will know the thing.

But this sum is never complete. What of triangles not yet drawn? What of dogs unborn, thoughts unthought, futures unformulated? The extension only ever points – it cannot explain why. It gestures to a field, but not to the force that binds the field together. It answers the question what, but stutters before the question why this and not that.

Intension, by contrast, peers into the concept’s heart. It speaks in essences, in the necessary and sufficient conditions that conjure a thing into being. “A triangle,” it whispers, “is a three-sided polygon whose internal angles sum to 180 degrees.” Never mind whether it has been drawn. Never mind whether anyone has seen it. If the conditions are met, the triangle is. It exists by virtue of structure, not instance.

But even intension deceives. The essence of a thing, when named, begins to drift from it. No definition is identical with its object. The more precise the net, the more it reveals its own holes. We discover, again and again, that the map cannot contain the territory  –  though we have mistaken maps for kingdoms since the beginning of abstraction. In attempting to define, we summon both clarity and loss. What we name, we isolate. What we isolate, we estrange.

The philosopher’s anguish is this: identity is not equivalence. A thing is never quite identical to its definition, even when the definition is true. There is always remainder. A name does not capture. It approximates. It signals. It seduces the mind into thinking it understands. But understanding is not enclosure. It is an echo thrown across an abyss.

This is the trouble with identification. To identify is not merely to recognize. It is to become identified with. The self, too, lives by definition  –  layered, recursive, and often contradictory. We define ourselves by extensions: the roles we play, the acts we've committed, the names by which others call us. But these are garments, not flesh. Intension – the internal pattern of desire, fear, thought, and value – eludes even our own grasp.

“I am this,” we say. But what is “I”? Is it the list of past actions? The intention behind the next one? The unspeakable midpoint between choice and fate? Definitions of the self always fall short – yet without them, we drift. We cling to categories not because they are true, but because they provide contour. Identity is less about being and more about not-being-everything-else.

Yet the act of defining, though flawed, is not false. It is creative. It is ritual. To define is to assert pattern over chaos, to draw thresholds where otherwise there would be blur. And if the world resists our definitions, it is not always because they are wrong, but because the world itself is in flux. Meaning is a tide, not a fact. To define is to cup water in the hands. The shape may not last, but the act is still real.

So we move between the two poles: the extensional and the intensional, the outward pointing and the inward pulling, the countable and the conceptual. Neither suffices. Together they form a kind of imperfect symmetry – a gesture toward understanding, even if not its fulfillment.

And perhaps that is enough. Not to capture, but to listen. Not to define absolutely, but to trace the shape of what resists shape. Not to say “this is that,” but to murmur: “this reminds me of that, this calls that to mind, this is near that in the dreamscape of thought.”

For in the end, we are not creatures of definition, but of desire. And desire does not define – it longs. It circles. It returns. The truth of a thing may not be what it is, but what it becomes when we try to name it. And in that becoming, something flickers into being.

The net does not hold – but the gesture of casting it matters.

The Stillness That Contains the Storm

 

 Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (1931)

I have always been afraid of being late. Not merely inconvenienced, not mildly delayed, but out of time – misaligned with whatever invisible schedule governs the day. The fear is irrational in proportion and perfectly rational in behavior. I arrive early as a form of prophylaxis. When I worked at the museum, I would reach the building a half hour ahead of schedule, lingering in the quiet corridors before opening hours, because I did not trust Halifax traffic, or weather, or the peculiar way minutes seem to vanish when one begins to rely on them. Snow, fog, a stalled bus, a red light that lingers too long – any of these could conspire to produce that small but corrosive shame of tardiness. Better to wait than to rush. Better to be already there.

This habit has never been about punctuality alone. It carries a deeper unease: the suspicion that time is not entirely obedient, that it can slip its leash without warning, that one might suddenly discover oneself on the wrong side of an event. To be late is not simply to arrive after something has begun; it is to miss a window that will not reopen. It is to feel, however briefly, that the world has moved on without you.

Harlan Ellison understood this terror with manic precision. “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman” is less a satire of authoritarianism than a nightmare about temporal obedience. Its universe is governed by the tyranny of schedules, where lateness is not inconvenience but crime, and where time itself becomes a moral instrument. What unsettles is not merely the punishment, but the metaphysics implicit in it: that time has a correct order, a single acceptable cadence, and that deviation from it threatens the whole. Ellison’s story exaggerates, but it does not invent. It exposes the latent anxiety already humming beneath modern life – the sense that time is something one must keep up with, or be erased by.

Yet even as I buffer myself against delay, I have long suspected that this anxiety rests on a fragile picture of time itself. We behave as though time were a river, carrying us forward whether we will it or not. We speak of falling behind, of running out, of saving and wasting it. Lateness, in this grammar, becomes a kind of ontological failure. You were not where you were supposed to be when you were supposed to be there. Something has been lost.

But what if this entire grammar is a convenience rather than a truth? What if the fear that drives us to arrive early, to synchronize obsessively, to dread missing the moment, is founded on a misunderstanding about what moments are? What if nothing ever truly slips away?

These questions begin, deceptively, as personal unease. They end as metaphysics. To follow them is to confront a view of time that dissolves the very notion of lateness, not by excusing it, but by rendering it incoherent. A view in which arriving early or late becomes merely a feature of perspective, not a verdict handed down by reality itself.

There is an ancient temptation, older than clocks, older than calendars: the desire to stop time – not merely in the fantasy of halting decay, or preserving love, but in the deeper sense of seeing time not as it appears, but as it is. Eternalism, that glacial and unsettling doctrine, emerges from this temptation and gives it ontological teeth. It whispers what few dare say aloud: that all moments are equally real. That your birth, your death, the pause before a first kiss, the moment after a final breath–they are not gone or not-yet. They are. Always.

To step into eternalism is to step out of the familiar choreography of past, present, and future. The dance halts. Or rather, it continues – but all at once, a thicket of overlapping gestures frozen in the same breath. The present, that most vaunted illusion, becomes just one ledge among many. Time no longer flows; it stretches, like landscape. And you, who once imagined yourself drifting downriver, now see the whole winding path from above, every twist and eddy fixed in the same eternal stillness.

This is not a comforting vision. Presentism, the folk religion of consciousness, flatters us: only this moment is real. The past is memory, the future fantasy, and the now is a sacred flame we alone can touch. But eternalism tears the veil. It says: there is no unique “now,” only an infinite tapestry of nows, stitched together beyond the needle of perception. Your sense of flow is parochial. Your “now” is not the world’s pulse, but a local arrangement, like a shadow cast by a moving sun across one corner of the mind.

It is physics that forced the confession. In special relativity, simultaneity dissolves under pressure. Two events that appear to happen together in one frame unfold in sequence in another. There is no universal clock, no privileged observer. And so, what happens “now” for you may already be past or future for someone else. The structure of spacetime offers no perch for a universal present. All events – those within your light cone, those eternally out of reach–are equally woven into the same four-dimensional manifold. A block universe. A crystal of all becoming.

This block has no front, no direction, no flow. Motion is internal to the structure; it is we who move. Or rather, we do not move at all – we are motion’s illusion, the cross-section of a line mistaken for a point. To live in such a universe is to be smeared across its length, a static filament of experience mistaken for a moving flame. Memory gives the illusion of momentum, but we are fixed, held. The fall into time is the trick of self-awareness unfolding across a curve already drawn.

Some recoil from this. It feels deterministic, dead, alien. If the future already exists, where is freedom? If the past is as real as the now, where is growth? Yet this unease may be the sign of a deeper misunderstanding. Eternalism does not imprison us – it dissolves the very notion of imprisonment. The self that chooses, the self that laments or hopes, is not an error within the block. It is one of its facets. Choice, from within, is as real as structure, from without. We are not less free – we are differently real.

The ancients sensed this. Parmenides, serene in his paradoxes, declared that change is illusion and being is one. Zeno followed, constructing impossible stairways through time and space, arguing that motion cannot be, since the whole is already there. Augustine, haunted by the mind’s inability to grasp time, concluded that time exists only in us – a distension of the soul. And God, if He sees, sees not in sequence, but in simultaneity: all things as one. To such a gaze, eternity is not endless time, but timelessness itself.

Eternalism does not ask us to see like this. It is not a mystic’s flight, but a philosopher’s sobriety. Yet the strange beauty of the eternalist view begins to shine when we let go of resistance. The moments of our life do not slip into the abyss. They do not perish. They are preserved – not in memory, not in Heaven, but in the structure of reality itself. The laugh you shared with your sister at five, the embarrassment in the classroom, the ache of your first loss – they remain, not as echoes, but as coordinates. They are not gone. They are simply elsewhere.

Perhaps grief itself is shaped by our refusal of eternalism. We mourn the past because we believe it has ceased to be. We fear the future because we imagine it is unreal. But what if we are wrong? What if every love we have known, every wound we have suffered, is not vanished, but forever stitched into the fabric of the whole? Then mourning becomes something else – an acknowledgment, not a lament. And longing becomes a strange form of recognition, like remembering a place you haven’t visited yet.

To think this way is not easy. It asks us to unlearn the grammar of becoming. It asks us to live inside a paradox: that everything changes, and nothing does. That we are both in time and outside it. That our lives are sequences and sculptures. One may feel the tension in the chest, the almost nauseating stillness beneath appearances. But perhaps this is the deeper rhythm of being – not a line, but a resonance. Not a journey, but a shape.

Eternalism, taken seriously, is a metaphysical wound. It strips the mind of chronology and replaces it with a strange intimacy with all moments. We are not moving forward. We are arriving forever. There is no now–there is only this shimmer, this intersection of viewpoint and event. And every possible intersection, even the ones you have not yet known, already awaits. You are already old. Already dead. Already born. Already dreaming.

The only question left is not what happens next, but: can you bear to see the world this way? Can you live in a time that does not flow? Can you forgive yourself, knowing that every version of you still exists, somewhere, always?

In the stillness that contains the storm, everything is happening. And has happened. And will happen. Nothing is ever lost.