In Margaret Forster’s novel, The Memory Box, Catherine writes these lines:I put the red hat on, and the dark blindfold provided by the airline, and tried to lull myself to sleep. I must live in the present.
It was the only way but controlling my urge to leap ahead in the future, or speculate about the past and never live in the present, was almost impossible.
Tony had complained about this all the time. He’d found it so wearing, the way I endlessly anticipated what was going to happen or fantasized over what already might have happened—he said it was imagination gone mad.
But the present had never seemed a real place to me. It was useless, dull. Everything exciting lay in the unknown, the future, where anything was possible.
Margaret Forster, The Memory Box (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 107.