I'm currently absorbed by "Conversations about the end of time" [with Stephen Jay Gould, Umberto Eco, Jean-Claude Carriere and Jean Delumeau. Fromm, NY, 2000]. In answer to the question "Are we witnessing the end of time?", Carriere [amongst other things, Bunuel's scriptwriter] responds:

"The first thing that occurs to me, and which is indisputable, is that we are seeing the end of a number of grammatical tenses. Where has the future anterior gone? What's happened to the past historic? The imperfect subjunctive is only very rarely used nowadays … What are grammatical tenses if not the painstaking attempt of our precise, meticulous minds to envisage all the possible shapes that time can take, all the ways in which we relate to time within the domain of our thoughts and actions? … We shall never be able to carve up time into a sufficient number of tenses to control it and be able to say, at each instant within its fleeting forward movement: That's the time it is."