The Present Time

"Catch, then, oh catch the transient hour" Winter

        It is a singular thing that the present is something which most of us are always scouting. The past lies in an inwrapping mist that hides all pettiness, all daily annoyance, and leaves only the salient facts of pleasure or displeasure apparent, and has about it in our fancy some of the sacred character with which we surround the dead. The future, too, wears a halo rimmed with joyous expectancy, and is a Delectable Land gilded in a sunlight of possibility. But the present the here and now is our every-day life, is dull and commonplace, and worth little. What we might have done in the past we regard with a certain fondness ; what we may do in the future, with eager anticipation ; what we can do in the present, with doubt and disgust. Never do today what you can put off till to-morrow, is a reversal of the ancient maxim that goes to the heart of many of us. We are too apt to have that contempt for today which we have for all familiar things, and we disregard its opportunities, just as we think, in piping times of peace, that we could have done so much better if we had been born in a stirring era; or in war times, that we "should have come to something" if we had had the opportunities that peace affords ; just as we think, if our surname is a common one, that it would have been very different with us if we had been born Montmorencys or Grosvenors; if we are poor, that with wealth we could have sprung upward as the vaulter flies with the upward impulsion of the spring-board ; if we are rich, that perhaps poverty would have spurred us to a worthy exertion.

      There are few of us that willingly take to-day as a stepping-stone, few of us who think cf it as a stepping-stone at all. Yet if we so frequently fail to avail ourselves now of the opportunities of the moment, when to-morrow is today shall we regard it as any better worth, or do anymore wisely with the new possession? And yet we all know that if we are going to do anything with tomorrow we must be making ready to-day. When tomorrow comes rising over us it may be as full of opportunities as the cloud is of lightnings, but if we have not our kite ready to fly, we shall draw none of those lightnings down.

      But while, on the one hand, this disregard and waste of the present is loss to ourselves, on the other hand, it involves a peculiar selfishness, a sort of psychological anomaly, that is seldom guessed or considered. We delay the disagreeable duty, put off the laborious effort, till to-morrow, for what reason? Because to-morrow is another country, another climate, an unknown region, and because the person of to-morrow is quite another person from the person of today so very much another that the person of to-day saves himself all the difficulty and trouble possible by pushing it over to the person of tomorrow. It is only another form of that selfishness which we exhibit when we indulge ourselves in any license, in any pleasure of the present, for which we know tomorrow will bring in a heavy price and penalty to be paid. The person of to-day is to have the license and the pleasure, the person of tomorrow must pay the penalty. It is indeed only another form of that terrible selfishness which allows the parent to practice a self-indulgence which shall some day ruin the child, who does not inherit any share of the pleasure of that self indulgence, but only the ruin of its penalty.

      But the selfishness of this evasion of the present rises into more metaphysical regions. The folly of it is something that even the simplest thinker can hardly fail to see. For the present is all that we certainly have, and to let it slip by unimproved is to make ourselves so much the poorer, since the moment that we improve is ours forever, but the moment that we do not seize, do not improve, escapes us, has nothing to do with us, never enriches us, never was, indeed, so far as we are concerned, and our life is by that much more a blank. The present is as safe as time; tomorrow is as vague as eternity. Eternity may have its own uses ; we know nothing about them ; it is among infinite things, and we are among finite. The uses of time we know well, and that one of them is to make ourselves round and complete as a star for our course through that infinity.

"Ages past the soul existed ;

Here an age 'tis resting merely,

And hence fleets again for ages." 

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