February 13
“We never keep to the present. We anticipate the future as if it were coming too slowly, and call back the past to hold on to it. So we wander through times that are not ours and never think of the only one that truly belongs to us.”
Pensées (freely rendered)
Listening mode
“We never keep to the present. We anticipate the future as if it were coming too slowly, and call back the past to hold on to it. So we wander through times that are not ours and never think of the only one that truly belongs to us.”
The past has an advantage the present will never have: it is finished. You can tell it as a story, with a beginning and a turn, and even a difficult stretch takes on a shape in hindsight. The future can be shaped too, at least in your mind. You sketch it, discard one draft and try another.
The present, by contrast, is still unsorted. Whether this afternoon will turn out to be a good one, you only find out later. A conversation you're having right now could remain trivial or prove to be the beginning of something. As long as you're in the middle of it, you can't see the whole. Perhaps that's why you are so often elsewhere: less out of impatience than out of a wish to see things already in their finished form.
In narrated time, though, you are always a spectator. There you can judge, regret and be glad. What you can no longer do there, or not yet, is intervene.
Here you can still ask a question, take back a sentence or stay longer. Which of these will count later, you won't find out here.
