Aspect is a way of looking

Readers meet the aorist and are told it is a past tense. Then a grammar mentions an aorist subjunctive, or an aorist infinitive, and the past tense quietly leaves the room. The cleaner account is older than the classroom shortcut: the aorist is an aspect. It presents an action as a whole. Tense, the location in time, is a further choice, and in the indicative it often does land in the past.

The present stem does the other kind of looking. It presents an action as open, repeated, or underway. That is why the imperfect, built on the present stem with past endings, can mean “I was loosening” or “I kept loosening”, while the aorist indicative of the same verb can mean “I loosened” as a single complete event.

None of this is exotic if you already speak Slovenian. A nedovršni verb looks at the action while it is open. A dovršni verb looks at it as a whole. Greek organises the same distinction inside the stem, then lets endings, augment, and mood do their own work. The useful question in either language is not “what is the translation of this tense?” but “how is the speaker asking me to see the action?”

Paradigms still have to be learned. They are the instrument, not the music. Once the two ways of looking are audible, a table stops being a wall and becomes a keyboard.