When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions- such as merit, such as past, present, and future- our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.  

-- Peter Matthiessen (1927 - 2014)