Past to Present

an excerpt from Eco's "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana"

"You're saying you no longer live in time. We are the time we live in. We live in three moments of expectation, attention, and memory, and none of them can exist without the others. You can't stretch towards the future because you've lost your past."

"I'm holding a long note, like a stuck record, and since I can't remember the opening notes, I can't finish the song. I wonder what it is I'm supposed to finish, and why. While I was singing without thinking I was actually myself for the duration of my memory... I think a pianist works that way, too; even as he plays one note he's readying his fingers to strike the keys that come next. Without the first notes, we won't make it to the last ones, we'll come untuned, and we'll succeed in getting from start to finish only if we somehow contained the entire song within us. I don't know the whole song anymore. I'm like... a burning log. The log burns, but it has no awareness of having once been part of a whole trunk nor any way to find out that it has been, or to know when it caught fire. So it burns up and that's all. I'm living in pure loss."

Being in between at this moment often brings me to reflect upon the past and how it shapes my present. As I started reading Eco's latest work, I was reminded of how important our past is to our present and our future. I shall dwell and read more. You'll read more about Eco soon.

... somewhere above the Atlantic.