What is an instant—the punctum temporis—that Plato called ἐξαίφνης (exaíphnēs), the sudden? Is it a vanishing point between past and future, or the hinge on which both unfold? Plato saw it as an interruption in the flow of time, a fleeting spark where change occurs, yet which itself seems to escape duration. Augustine later reflected that the present, though indivisible, lives within us as the tension between memory and expectation.
Bergson went further, arguing that real time—la durée—cannot be reduced to a series of measurable instants. If an instant is infinitely small, it cannot be summed; if it can be summed, it is no longer an instant. Thus arises the paradox: if the present is composed of infinite instants, how can it ever be said to exist?
Perhaps time is not made of points but of relations—of movement, perception, and becoming. The instant would then be less a unit of time than a threshold of consciousness, the meeting place of continuity and change. In that sense, punctum temporis is where time reveals its true nature: elusive, dynamic, and inseparable from the act of being.
