22 May

Because everybody loves Proust. Another of his insights, both the past and the future exist in the present, not before and after it. They exist in the ‘qualities’ we experience in the present moment - the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the colours etc. Proust said we think qualities are like decoration for the things in the present moment, but actually they’re the way the past and the future occupy the present. Which isn’t actually hard to see I think, as in this quote, we might feel a foreboding, or experience an anxiety (a direct experience of a future to come, or a past that was, respectively). Or we lie to a lover, and that lie is the direct present expression of the future break-up.