She flips a switch, and time itself stands still. Away she runs, from her apartment, from her life, out on the street people and cars freeze, she alone moves, she passes them…she goes on running, determinedly, liberatingly, to a new possibility.

I sit in the dark theater watching the twelve chapters of her life. There is no switch for me to flip. And all I have, like every other man, is here and now.

Yet—but it reminds me of a philosophy lecture “The Past, the Present and the Future” given by a childlike elderly professor I attended and did not understand half of it—and yet, ‘here’ is filled with histories and memories; and ‘now’, the past flows into it, the future stretches from it.

Knowledge and memories, how could you be in a familiar place and not be reminded of all that has passed, the past was once ‘now’. And the ‘now’ you have at present will unstoppably be the past very soon.

这里 zhèlǐ, is the Chinese word for ‘here’.

这 now mainly means “this, the, here” has a completely different origin: the character when at first formed means only “walk and words”, to walk toward the guest at the door with warm greeting words, to welcome. Indeed it still has the walking radical 辶 that comes from the character for walk 走 , and inside the walking radical is the character for words: from 言 it has now evolved into 文.

The reason for this is that it’s a 假借字, a borrowed character.

The Chinese started making the characters by drawing. But there are concepts and ideas that are difficult to express with images. Hence the later developed method of borrowing existing characters to represent a new meaning.

里 has a two-layered meaning, it means the earth 土, it means the field 田, it means a human’s dwelling place, where he could build a house with the earth and get his food by plowing his field next to his house. And from this, its meaning extends to “community, village, unit of distance, alley, lane, hometown”.

里 also means “the lining, the inner layer of clothing”, and that’s why it has a similar pronunciation with 衣, clothes.

‘Now’ in Chinese is 现在 xiànzài.

现, to appear, to manifest, to become visible. It has jade 玉 for the left part, and to see 见 for the right part. 见 also tells the pronunciation. The story behind it may be: the jade appears.

在, be living, exist, it means the earth, the soil 土, it pronounces as 才 which also forms part of the character. It’s from the image that the new grass comes out of the soil, it lives, it grows and it exists. It is here.

How interesting it is that in Chinese ‘here’ comes from the meaning of a human’s dwelling place: the earth that you use to build your house and the field that you plow for your food: it is his ‘here’. And ‘now’ means what appears in front of you, what exists now as you see them.

Like in the movie the woman arrests ‘now’, but what is ‘now’? It’s the man you see pouring coffee at that very moment, it’s the woman you see crossing the street, it’s lovers kissing and dogs barking.

It is your memory, it is your knowledge, it is so many connections you build up in your head, it is the nameless feeling rushing up in your heart that makes you do this and do that.