No, not *that* Lost

I look at Brainpickings quite regularly, where she likes to pair snippets of literature in a wine/food sort of way. Looking at a (tangentially) related post today, I found a picnic I could bring the Chardonnay to, as it were.

Rebecca Solnit is one of those writers whose books I always find in vacation cottages, usually in Northern California, and can never bear to put back. So I have a small collection of her writings, all stolen. From "A Field Guide to Getting Lost":

Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery.

In an afterword to one of the editions of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" Robert Pirsig offers an Ancient Greek perspective on time:

They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.

He goes on:

When you think about it, that's a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

Ten years after the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the Ancient Greek perspective is certainly appropriate. What sort of future is coming up from behind I don't really know. But the past, spread out ahead, dominates everything in sight.