Quote:

Quote:


I'm reading Diane Ackerman's An Alchemy of Mind. She quotes various folk at the beginning of each chapter. Her quote for Chapter 13, What Is a Memory, is:


"What sort of future is coming up from behind I don't
really know. But the past, spread out ahead, dominates
everything in sight."
--Robert M. Pirsig,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance



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Great book, but the sentiment expressed by Pirsig above is analogous prose without logical semantical function. Time is progressive. The memory of the event is not the event and that memory occurs in the present and then influences the future.

And while we can construct worthwhile allegorical concepts like "time stood still" and "backwards in time", the essence of "time" is it's "progression" and to use the term otherwise requires the complete obliteration of the meaning of the word and the creation of an altogether new meaning for the term "time".



Zen and the art... is about a man showing his past to his son, whom he hasn't seen due to being locked up in a mental institution - the past being the roads of America, the future being the son, whom he desires to get to know, sitting behind him on the motorcycle. So there is nothing wrong with the image. Read the book again - it's a teacher.