'....you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of if, and now you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.
But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remembered now, are of a different life in a different world and time.When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.
Your life, as you have lived it, is way back yonder in time. But you are still living, and you living life, expectations subtracted, has a shape, and the shape of it includes the past. The absent and the dead are in it. And the living are in it.'
Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter, p.148.
