On The Horror of Living in the Moment

I used to celebrate the idea of living in the moment. That is to say, of enjoying the very nowness of time with neither memory of the past, nor anticipation of days to come.

But now, having witnessed how Alzheimer's traps and isolates a person precisely in a perpetual present, I know that this is actually a petrifying prospect. One might become innocent, in a Nietzschean sense of the term (i.e. as a concept closely tied to forgetfulness), but one becomes less than human rather than overhuman and increasingly without world, as Heidegger would say.

In other words, to live in the moment is to inexorably turn to stone ...