The importance of treating time as practice has to do with agency and progress in the Anthropocene. I don’t use agency and progress in the Romantic/Modern sense of an atomizing self-development or as an art of living. I mean engaging with our capacity for expanding the ways in which we see our entanglements in the world. When we start to practice time as duration, simultaneity, interruption, ressentiment, mimetic desire and the like, we begin to see more of our entanglements without ever believing that we can see it all. In some way, we become Montaigne again: “The disconcerting abundance of phenomena which now claimed the attention of men seemed overwhelming. The world – both outer world and inner world – seemed immense, boundless, incomprehensible. The need to orient oneself in it seemed hard to satisfy and urgent.”[1]

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[1] Eric Auerbach, Mimesis, 310.