Carvin SH550

In his 2017 book The Order of Time, Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli looks to Saint Augustine to demystify the question of how it’s possible to experience music if we are physically rooted to the present—while music, of course, happens over seconds, minutes, hours. “It is possible, Augustine observes, because our consciousness is based on memory and anticipation,” Rovelli writes. “A hymn, a song, is in some way present in our minds in a unified form, held together by something—that which we take time to be. And hence this is what time is: It is entirely in the present, in our minds, as memory and anticipation.”