MARS

“I had always been told that the days followed one another, that the seasons came to an end. Of course, this was what they told me and I was bound to believe what grown-up people and the schoolmaster asserted. I had been told it, granted. But ‘next year’ was only a word; and even if I believed that this 'next year’ would one day come, it seemed so far away that it wasn’t worth thinking about; the time in between was as long as eternity; so it was just as if it was never going to come. You made no plans, you could make none, since it was so far ahead, so very far ahead… . In any case, though tomorrow was going to come, though the seasons would end and then return, it was they that would go and come back, while I should stay in the same place. The sun and the stars moved around me, who stood still at the centre of everything. The earth and its colours and its fields and its snow and rain all moved around me. I don’t know at what point it was that I must have taken a sort of step. How did it happen? From that moment onward I became aware of the past. I ought not to have stirred, I was swept into the dance, caught up in the whirling movement of things. Being in Time means running after the present. You run after things, you run with things, you flow away.”