Arresting time …

… The Quest for Permanent Novelty - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Over the past two centuries, Romantic and post-Romantic writers have discovered in the peculiar temporal structure of first impressions a strategy for pursuing Keats's and Augustine's paradoxical goal. The effort to counter neurobiological time finds expression in an effort to achieve two experientially related but conceptually distinct states. The first is the felt slowing or stopping of time that accompanies an intensely vivid perception. The second is the persistence of this perceptual intensity across chronological time.