Preface
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets: Burnt Norton
In this fragment from Burnt Norton, Eliot describes a Buddhist conception of time, one which encourages us to think of past time, present time and future time as interwoven with one another. This Buddhist concept is a useful counter-balance to our mechanistic notion of time as a linear sequence of moments which occur one after the other, and which constitute a series which can be traversed in one direction only.
Anything at all – you, or me, or any of the changeable objects around us – is at the present moment the latest stage in the history of what we are. With a different history, ...
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