“We should become the time-zombies…”
[…] the temporal reality of nonhuman life is limited almost entirely to the present. In the worlds of the most advanced species there are slight extensions of that press to the immediate future and past. Chimps, for instance, can play hide-and-seek. But even for apes, time is always “banana now.” It is never “banana for my grandchildren yet to be born” or “banana last month.” […]
Members of our species were able to conceive and create the great cultural continuities of humankind – the arts, letters, and sciences – because the mind’s reality embraced the immensity of time from the distant pasts to distant futures […]
If in our individual and collective behavior we were to let our mental present deteriorate to a “banana-now” present – which is as close to the nanosecond world as we can get in practical terms – then we should lose the very capacity that built human civilizations. We should become the time-zombies of a banana-now republic.
Could this happen?
Yes, it could.
§
He looked at me, with his piercing visage that’s always ready to tell you like it is. “You’ve loved enough,” he said. “And you have scars, just none that people can see.”
“Nothing else really counts at all”
“That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”