When you’re young, time is a puzzle, like interlocking nails. You wonder what you ought to be doing or what the future holds or how things that don’t seem to have worked out will work out; and in such a mood, even when you are focused on the future because you are yet to get laid, to bloom, to beget, to find your way, to win a tournament, you nevertheless don’t detail far-off somedays in your head; you don’t feel your future as you feel a thigh … because the present is too intense, too sunny, brief as a sneeze, too higgledy-piggledy, too complete, too total a drag already, whereas there is simply so much future, the future is flat as the sea three miles from your eye while the beach you are sitting on is aboil with sunshine and nakedness. The future is constantly killing off the present by becoming it. The future is too—thank God—vague to deal with. The future may not arrive. Yet that is all you value, all you hope for: fine future things; so you think, I’m not here at present; I’m just a movie made of slow-motion dreams; haven’t I always been, then and now? wondering about when: when the dust will settle and the sky clear, when I will hear cheers and I’m handed my trophy.
Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (p. 130). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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