Denying the present

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden”. (…)
Excerpt from T.S. Eliot, “No. 1 of 'Four Quartets'”

I don’t remember exactly when I’ve read this poetry for the first time. I don’t purposely learn verses by heart, since I finished the primary school. But in this case, everything fit automatically into my mind. It sounds so natural, in a way: in fact, both present and past are reorganized and projected permanently into an unknown future, only to diminish this uncertainty. We are present, physically, but in fact we are almost all the time absent. Sometimes, I think we are fully enjoying the present while sleeping, because only then we are out of the normative time. We wake up thinking what we’ll have to do; we finish our day thinking what we’ve done. We start our lives as a plan – of the others, mainly our family; when we grow up we are able ourselves to manage our escape from the present. I haven’t yet fully evaluated the percentage, but mostly we spend our lives in an antechamber: waiting to grow up, to have our “future”, to accomplish our “dreams”, to have a family, to help our children to be themselves, to dye. Some are desperately hoping/believing in an after-life, but as the continuation of the same mechanical waiting lines.