A man looked back at the past and tried to write something down.
As he traced a few memories, he began to doubt whether they had truly happened.
Are memory and fact ever the same?
He paused and looked more closely. It began to feel as though even memory was being generated in this very moment.
Perhaps “the past” is nothing more than something thought about now.
The thought unsettled him. He decided it was only a kind of experiment.
After all, within his field of vision there were objects that seemed to prove something had existed before.
Yet he wondered—does the presence of a thing prove the past, or is it only coherence assembled afterward?
The confusion remained, but so did a quiet sense that something essential was near.
He stopped looking back. Instead, he turned toward “this very moment.”
He realized he could not think it.
Thought could move only toward the past or the future. Neither existed in this very moment.
Perhaps the past and the future—because they can be thought—are themselves only illusions.
He did not know what that meant, so he stopped trying to know.
After a while, he simply felt this moment.
Something was pleasant.
He did not need to name it.
One does not need the recipe
to taste what is good.