A ticket purchased, an appointment made, a meeting arranged; these indicate events in the near future and they are accompanied by a sense of an intervening duration with its content roughly blocked-in; this duration is ancillary, it is to be traversed. The anticipated event is also blocked-in but in a central way so that you define it with a displaced form of presence, you look forward to meeting yourself there, you hold it as constant in foresight as the intervening duration shrinks, contracts to nothing. There is a way, a rhythm to this contraction which may vary greatly but which maintains the position, the accorded reality of the event. You may be wishing the gap shorter or longer, or merely observing it, but in spite of your subjective comportment towards it it melts out of existence. And the event is now present, a concert or a tryst, a flight or a visit to the dentist; the anticipation is cancelled, the ticket handed over, the event itself opens a new sense of present duration; other anticipations remain open; you more or less fail to meet yourself in the unmediated unfolding of the event; you can only gather impressions as well as you can as they deliquesce in your attention; oddly the projection forward has not ceased, time filled with pleasure or pain never stops. The event is now complete, the account is closed, you go home; a new duration opens between you and the event, but now in the past and growing without limit. Temporal structures of this kind easily overlap and meld. Each has its own rhythm and these intertwine in a complex counterpoint. It is always like this and yet nothing actually flows, nothing really moves. The now is always here, the future there, the past over there. If there is a sharply defined sound you can attend to it as it recedes into the past, as the reverberation smoothly fades to silence, but this is just a way of thinking, the sound never moved, your attention swiveled on its axis. This present, stationary and so very alive, becomes confused with what filled it a moment ago, and we imagine the present itself falling away into the past. But present is always present, future is always to come, and past is always passed.