by Suzy Charnas

Created on: February 01, 2009   Last Updated: February 11, 2009

We dwell on the past for the same reason that we dwell on the future: the present is too intense, too deep and detailed, too overwhelming, and too existential for most of us to endure with our full consciousness for more than a few moments at a time.

The past is attractive because we shape it to please ourselves in memory. The unreliability of memory has been clearly demonstrated through many scientific experiments, and is the root of the teaching in law schools and police academies about the unreliability of an "eye-witness", due to the unconscious distortions, omissions, and confusions of memory that we are all prey to. No one can go back and check a memory against the full reality of a past moment, so we have a good deal of freedom of play in our memory, to make our high experiences higher, our low ones lower, as part of sharpening our interior story of our life, with self as the hero (or, sometimes, the victim, or even the villain).

With the future, the sky's the limit: we can daydream whatever suits us, fleshing out our hopes and our fears, our rewards and revenges, as if performing perfect stage plays in the privacy of our own minds.

But the present moment - this moment, now, in the instant before it passes into the infinitely malleable past - the present moment bears upon us with all of its complexity, its sense-impressions, its open and unanswerable questions and mysteries, and the impossibility of holding onto it long enough to plumb its depths and really understand it.

Consider: a middle-aged woman sits, in the present, in a local coffee and gelato shop on a major avenue of a major city. Stop the present (she can't, but we can, in our imaginations), and check it out: the air in the shop is a little too warm (she has taken off her coat), and jangles vaguely with piped pop music, a song almost familiar enough to identify. There's a sticky spot on the table top, right next to where a drop of her own gelato (chocolate, very light and lightly flavored except for a swirl of dark chocolate syrup buried inside) has melted and fallen off the edge of the container (let's not stop to describe it, although it is distinctive). She has no napkin, and only considers for a second dipping up the drop on her fingertip and eating it (who knows when the table was last wiped clean, although the shop is big and airy and very clean-feeling, and one of the staff has just come out with a mop and mopped up some spills from the table a few feet away where a little blond boy in

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