Berlin now warm, the days are spent writing. The nights are spent invariably next to an open window, reading, or in a small bar, sitting on the street with quiet friends, talking. Thus begin the divisions of the day from the evening.

Stories within stories offer little respite to an archaeologist, but it is clear to the casual observer – if there could be such a thing – that all divisions are imprecise. Rather, to say all divisions can be once more divided would be a truth more applicable.

Place divisions between yourself and your recall, your future and your past, the moment you are in and the moment that just vanished behind you. Place divisions between the thoughts of your younger self and the words of your future self, between your narratives and your memories of the events that make up those narratives.

These divisions are so entirely infinite that one cannot say for certain that there are in fact divisions at all. The voices belong to others but the story belongs to no-one.
Yet, it is not impossible to detect a hand reaching out through one's sobriquet towards a real sense of being. A character begins to form, not quite yet a person, but certainly not an objective viewpoint.

Today, out in the dusty park, itself a former train station that used to send carriages out to Wroclaw and Vienna, there were many people, some of whom knew each other and others who just sat together in silence upon the benches watching the ice-cream sellers and bicycles. Echoes of previous use partly exposed, the park's previous function must influence in some way its present-day use. Severely damaged in the Second World War, repaired, then rendered untenable by the Cold War, what journeys are still taken from there? The park itself is a site for all within the neighbourhood, especially on a hot day, and in need of the unsociability of crowds I often head there to read, to a bench by the huge crater that dominates the centre of the park.

Once there today, I began to read Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year. On a first glance it's narrative threads, delicately fractured and separated by thin lines between paragraphs, are immaculate. Characters are introduced, deeply characterised narrative arcs are split away from the dominant non-fictional prose, and the sets of sentences begin to run alongside each other like trains. The war on terror, technological advancements in guidance systems, avian flu (apt, as today my sister was diagnosed with that other media favourite, swine flu), suicide bombings and some eloquent unravelling of Hobbes alongside an unfolding story of infatuation and temptation.

In fact, I could have continued to read much longer in the park than I did but, prompted by a strange encounter, I returned home. As I sat silently, deep in the beginnings of the novel, a man rode his bicycle past me, stopped abruptly and dismounted. He then sat next to me on the bench, watching the ice-cream sellers and bicycles, and three times, very slowly, with each single word utterance preceded by a minute's silence, said bahnhof. Station.

Immediately after the third articulation, he got up and left on his bicycle. I felt for a moment like some kind of spy, as though I had been given some codeword which would be of invaluable use at some time in the future. Perhaps, I thought, I am a carrier of codes without even knowing. Perhaps I am not complicit at all and I think that by writing here I am in fact jettisoning any hidden meaning the word should have had. Perhaps that is what they wanted me to do all along.

Perhaps the man was a lunatic. Perhaps the man was learning German. I am learning German. Perhaps the word he said wasn't bahnhof at all, but another word in English that I wasn't expecting. Perhaps I just heard bahnhof because I was siting upon the buried railway tracks of a former station. Perhaps by writing it here I am transmitting it to another operative. Perhaps I am a lunatic. Perhaps I am complicit in this entire affair and I write here to absolve myself of a knowingness, to promote an ignorance. Certainly, that is it. I write here to promote an ignorance - my own. After the bahnhof incident, I could concentrate no longer on poor Coetzee. So, here I am, back at the apartment, not reading, promoting my own ignorance.

A new week to finish an old weekend. Nothing unusual happened, only the usual, the long timeless days, the aimless reading and walking and almost continual eating. I am a casual glutton with no sense of decorum, no sense of the liabilities and responsibilities of leisure time. Instead I spend this time eating or working, not in the hardware shop or cycling to lakes like normal folks. My time is still, just about, my own.

The following is in some way a reading of Badiou's The Century, or of a very small part of his writing reflecting on temporality. The prose I lay down is fully culpable as a misdirected summary. Like all writing, the ideas belong to someone else, the mistakes of execution exist wholly in the text before you.

Here, I take the lead of Sebald who in a lecture suggested that all who want to be writers should write down everything they read and hear of significance, without references. Then, at a later date, the would-be writer can pull out that notebook, perhaps in a falling summer dusk with bats flitting all around in the courtyard, and use those phrases with impunity. Plagiarism in ignorance is the saving grace of the author. From notes laid down on paper, the following thoughts transpired.

The twentieth century raised its own sense of historical time, a representation of political conflict as a type of family tree. These dynastic visions take in great swathes of history and attribute to them characteristics, perhaps as 'houses' like the great royal families of Old Europe. The is no room for individualism in such a transcription of time, it removes temporality from the individual and transcends it to enormous silent movements beneath the feet of many generations.

For just about everyone, the day after tomorrow is abstract and the day before yesterday incomprehensible.

That sentence is certainly not mine. With it Badiou summons the atemporality of the 21st century. Ground in the instantaneity of everyday thought, Badiou relates time to no longer be a shared individual experience but rather a construct that is largely political. The 20th century was one that constructed time for itself in five-year plans, governmental terms of office and loan repayments. This construction was voluntary.

Gone are the times of the cycle, of land, tide, season and weather marked by shared human activity, marked by harvest and sleep. Instead we are brought into an age which is simultaneously work and rest, panic and stillness. In the face of such rapid everyday life, in the face of such a huge amount of information continually passing before us, we cannot help but enforce a certain passivity.

When I think of notions regarding the pace of life, I immediately envisage a river, a canoe on a fast river. Every now and again the canoeist, let us imagine it is Badiou himself, dips an oar into the current and pushes off from the bank allowing himself to be swept into the main flow of the river, over drops and rapids. Then, perhaps just as frequently, Alain acts upon the forces of the water again with his paddle and eases himself into a quiet eddy, an almost motionless circle of water to one side of the main current. Here he breathes and waits for the moment when he might throw himself once more into the flow.

Can it be that we have no grip of time any more, that we experience both agitation and impotence in the face of progress? If so, how did we come to this point? If the last century, as Badiou argues, was temporally constructivist, how did we end up in a future in which we had no control over time? Acceleration, technodeterminism, modernisation - are these the perpetuating models that we invented and now can no longer resist? Is this Toffler's futureshock?

Or rather, and this is where I speak more loudly than Badiou, can it be that the last century merely saw an abstraction of time? It saw time divided up and measured in such a way that lost all sense of how things actually progress. If the ticking of a clock is akin to lines on a measuring tape, a measurement between events, then perhaps all the last century did was change the speed of the clock, and on our behalf. Perhaps, all subjectivism in relation to time was lost to outside influence, it became no longer a human concept. This might explain, perhaps the movement into atemporality that we face today. Badiou states that

if we wish to attain the real of time we must construct it, and that, when all is said and done, this construction depends on the care with which we strive to become the agents of truth procedures.

So, a reconstruction of time is afoot. A new frame of reference is needed. The future is not what it used to be. With testing on the Large Hadron Collider stepping up for the next round of experiments, with ageing theory undergoing radical new schools of thought, and with network evolution continuing at some speed, there is a need for new theories of atemporality to allow us to subjectivise our own time.