The old ascetic floats for the first time: “I have washed my vessel clean. Only the present world moves in and out of me. I am only ever at once: memory meeting present experience. My memories too washed clean, reft of their morals and baptized in their original nature as past presents.”

Time remains a human crutch to wobble on in order. Like Hume says of cause and effect and the creation of custom, so too is a present utterly nonsensical without past or future, having come from nothing and going thereafter to nothing.