We do not visit places, we visit times

“When we miss a place, what we truly miss is the time that belonged to that place; we do not miss places, but times.”

When I read these words by Jorge Luis Borges, I felt that they expressed a truth we often sense but rarely know how to name. Borges speaks about nostalgia and about what we believe we have lost. Yet his words may also be applied to the act of discovering. Perhaps we do not only miss times instead of places; perhaps we never visit places at all, but rather brief and unrepeatable moments in their existence.

We imagine that a city remains the same because its streets keep their names, its buildings are still standing, and maps continue to show it as a fixed point. But cities are living organisms. Their inhabitants, customs, words, fears, and hopes change. The light changes, the weather changes, businesses disappear, and people find new ways of looking at one another. We also change while walking through them.

For this reason, no place can ever be visited twice. We may return to the same square, sit on the same bench, and look at the same building, but we will no longer be facing the same place. Days or years will have passed. Some people will have left, and others will have arrived. We, too, will be different. Even the Earth will have continued its one-way journey through the universe, moving around the Sun at approximately 107,280 kilometres per hour. A return is therefore only another form of a first visit.

To say that someone knew Berlin in 1940 is not the same as saying that they knew it in 2005. Walking through New York in 1972 was not the same experience as walking through it in 2020. The names remain, but time transforms places so deeply that they may seem to belong to different universes. A place is not made only of stone, streets, and coordinates. It is also made of the time passing through it.

This thought may cause sadness because it reminds us that nothing remains unchanged. Yet it may also be understood as a kind of privilege. The present, with everything good and terrible that it contains, is exclusive. No one will ever live this exact day again, see this city under the same light, or meet us exactly as we are now. Our presence in the world is also a limited edition.

The same is true of people. We never meet the same person twice. Experiences accumulate, opinions change, cells are renewed, and moods alter the way someone inhabits their own body. There are joyful times, sorrowful times, times of certainty, and times of confusion. We may meet someone familiar and discover a different person beneath the same face. What we truly know are the different times in a person’s life.

Perhaps living consists precisely of this: passing through places and people who are changing at the same time as we are. We do not possess the places we visit, nor can we preserve forever the people we know. We simply coincide with them at one brief point in time.

Rather than grieving because nothing can be repeated, perhaps we should learn to pay attention. Every journey, every conversation, and every encounter happens only once. We do not visit places: we visit times. And while we pass through them, we too become one of those times.