The Past is Now

What would I like to know? Obviously, something that I don’t already know. Like everyone else, I ask to be astonished. However, in a certain sense (and contrary to President Bush’s proclamation that “the past is over”), only the past is truly new—thus only the past can still surprise me.

The present is simply what is at this moment: I act, think and feel in it; nothing in it is new, since nothing else inhabits it except what’s there. The [End Page 40] future, for which I have hopes or recurring despair, can only offer me successive presents: this present, then that present, and then that one, etc. The future contains no novelty, for every time I leap into it, I discover there the present, nothing but the present. Whereas the past is continuous in me; it never ceases to inhabit me. What makes for its newness? The fact that each leap into the future, carrying into it what is now my present, modifies the past. In every present there is a sort of phase difference between this narrow sensation of the fleeting moment that appears only as what it is, and this ever-increasing sense of the past that I am reconsidering and that always appears as more to me.