Monday, October 6, 2014

On time

A quote that I have been marinating on for awhile now:
Crawling leaves on the streets of NYC.
"Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present."

Alan Watts on the art of timing and the pleasure of presence here.

In the same camp, someone sent this to me, from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities to me recently.  A working explanation of new pasts found by moving forward:

All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Beautiful words as another week begins.