190 struggling with the worldsociety, or an idea in the mind— that weakens or discredits our engage-
ment in the present limits our access to life in the only form in which
we can in fact live it: in the present. If we come to live life in part, as a
series of memories and of prophecies, of recurrences and expectations,
our experience of life will to that extent be made oblique.
Living for the future, in any of the sacred or secular forms advocated
by the struggle with the world, threatens to estrange us from the pres-
ent moment and therefore from life itself as it is lived, in the succession
of present moments, rather than as it may be evoked, at a remove, by
memory or anticipation. To the extent that this threat is realized, as a
result of the absence of some counteracting force or belief that would
remove it, we consume the time of our lives in grasping and longing for
something that by defi nition is not real, or much less real than life right
now. Th us, we squander by our own folly, as if smitten by desire for an
absolute that we project forward in time, the most important good, in-
deed the only good. By fl eeing in the mind from the real present to the
unreal future and ceasing to enter fully into life on the only terms in
which we could ever possess it, we give our lives away piecemeal even
before nature delivers us to death.
To the present world and to our experience within it, we say, “You
are not our home.” Instead, we claim citizenship in a future world that
will never be realized in our experience and to which we can have no
access except in the daydreams of our future- oriented discourse. It
hardly matters whether our inner distance from the present moment
takes the form of a cold indiff erence (as if all charms had passed from
the manifest world to an incorporeal simulacrum of it) or of an active
revulsion (provoked by the awareness of its inferiority to our true but
distant home). Th e result is the same: to entice us into trading the real
now for the fantastic later. Because such a trade cannot be executed,
we perform our part of the bargain only to die before receiving the
counter-performance.
Th e most important objection to the struggle with the world is that
it seduces us into war against the matchless good of life, lived in the
present, and gives us in exchange a counterfeit good: the future. Th ere
are two bad but commonplace ways to reckon with this failure of
consideration.