“Nothing which once has ceased to be is true.”Boethius · Mângâierile filozofiei · 524 · Cartea V, proza 6
Only the present fully exists; what has ceased to be can no longer be true.
Boethius is thinking about the nature of time and change, in a work written in prison while awaiting execution. His point is that only the present fully exists: the past is gone, the future is not yet here, so nothing that has passed is real anymore. The mechanism is simple: truth requires its subject to exist. A dead man is no longer a living man, and the fortune he thought was his dissolved along with him. That is why philosophy tells him not to anchor happiness in perishable things.
Boethius takes one further step: not only do things perish, but truths about them change too. The sentence "it is raining" was true yesterday, yet today it says nothing about the world. Truth is not an eternal storehouse; it is tied to the moment when things existed. Think of a queue at the pharmacy: your spot in line vanishes the moment you reach the counter, and "third in line" stops saying anything about you. If truth follows existence, then our judgments about the past are snapshots, not living reality. Which raises a question: how can we still say anything true about someone who no longer is?
Why it matters It helps anyone grieving a loss, a job, a relationship, wealth: you cannot cling to what is past, and much suffering comes from treating what no longer exists as if it were still real.