The traveller had reached the highest hill in the country.
Below him lay everything he had seen.
The bridge crossed the river.
The old road entered the city.
The garden spread around the house.
The paths divided among the hills.
The library held its old words.
The workshop held its tools.
The town carried decisions made by people whose names no one remembered.
For a long time, the traveller simply looked.
Then the old gardener appeared beside him.
“You have come a long way,” she said.
The traveller smiled.
“I have been trying to understand what the past leaves behind.”
“And what have you learned?”
He looked toward the bridge.
“The past does not leave us its events.”
“No.”
“It leaves what those events have become.”
The gardener nodded.
“The bridge was once a building project. Now it is a relation between two banks.”
“Yes.”
“A decision was once something someone did. Now it is part of the organisation of the town.”
“Yes.”
“A word was once used in a particular way. Now its history belongs to the resources of a living language.”
“Yes.”
The traveller looked across the valley.
“So the past remains.”
“Does it?”
He thought for a moment.
“Not as past.”
The gardener smiled.
“Then how?”
“As actuality incorporated into the present.”
They stood silently.
Below them, the country seemed suddenly different.
The traveller could see traces of countless things that had happened.
But the traces were not monuments to what was gone.
They were structures of what now existed.
Roads.
Bridges.
Languages.
Tools.
Customs.
Institutions.
Distinctions.
Each had once emerged from something that happened.
Each had then become part of the world in which something else could happen.
The gardener pointed toward the horizon.
“And what do you see there?”
“The future.”
“What does it look like?”
The traveller looked carefully.
There were no cities waiting to be built.
No bridges waiting to be crossed.
No events already standing in the distance.
There were only roads that might be taken.
Fields that might be cultivated.
Gates that might be opened.
Paths that might become roads.
Words that might acquire new meanings.
Ideas that might enter new relations.
Possibilities.
“That is strange,” he said.
“What is?”
“The past is everywhere.”
“And the future?”
“Nowhere.”
The gardener laughed softly.
“Not nowhere.”
She touched the traveller's shoulder.
“Here.”
He looked at her.
She pointed toward the country beneath their feet.
“The future is here?”
“As possibility.”
The traveller began to understand.
The future did not wait beyond the horizon.
It was present as what the present could become.
The country already contained roads.
But which roads would be taken?
The city already contained buildings.
But what would happen inside them?
The language already contained words.
But what would people make them mean?
The tools already existed.
But what would people do with them?
The possibilities were present.
The actualities were not yet.
The traveller turned toward the gardener.
“So the present faces in two directions.”
“Yes.”
“Backward, it is what has become.”
“Yes.”
“And forward, it is what can become.”
“Yes.”
He looked down at the valley.
The two directions seemed at first like mirror images.
But then he saw that they were not.
Behind him lay things that had happened.
They could not be unhappened.
The bridge could not be unbuilt simply by wishing it so.
The old word could not become unused merely because its first speakers had vanished.
The decision could not become undecided.
What had become actual had become irreversible as actuality.
But ahead of him lay possibilities.
They were not yet actual.
They could be taken up in different ways.
Some might never be taken up at all.
Some might lead somewhere unexpected.
Some might open possibilities that no one had imagined.
The traveller suddenly saw the difference.
The past was not a menu of possibilities.
It was inheritance.
The future was not an inheritance.
It was an opening.
He looked toward the old road.
“But the two meet.”
“They do.”
“How?”
The gardener pointed to the traveller himself.
“Here.”
The traveller laughed.
“Then I am the present?”
“Not you alone.”
She gestured toward the whole country.
“The present is the field in which what has become can become capable of something else.”
The traveller stood very still.
He remembered the seed.
The gate.
The bridge.
The road.
The city.
The tool.
The word.
He saw now that they had all been telling the same story.
Something happened.
Relations changed.
The changed relations became part of the world.
The world opened new possibilities.
Someone took up one of them.
Something became actual.
The relations changed again.
The traveller walked to the edge of the hill.
Below, a group of people were building a new bridge.
He watched them lay the first stones.
The bridge did not yet exist.
But the possibility of crossing was already changing the actions of those who built it.
When the bridge was finished, the country would be different.
Travellers would cross.
Goods would move.
A path would become busier.
Perhaps houses would gather nearby.
Perhaps a village would grow.
Perhaps one day the old bridge would stand at the centre of a city.
The traveller smiled.
He could almost see the future becoming the next past.
But then he realised something even stranger.
The future would not merely add another layer to the country.
It would change the relations among the layers already there.
The new bridge might give an old road a new purpose.
A new city might give an ancient path a new significance.
A new idea might make an old observation suddenly important.
A new word might give an old distinction a new life.
Each actualisation could reorganise the conditions inherited from before.
The traveller turned to the gardener.
“So the future can change the past.”
The gardener shook her head.
“The past remains what happened.”
“Then what changes?”
“What the past can do.”
The traveller looked back at the country.
He finally understood.
The future did not travel backwards.
Nothing reached into yesterday and altered yesterday.
But tomorrow's actualities could become today's relations.
And today's changed relations could alter the possibilities through which yesterday's actualities continued to participate in the world.
The old road could become a city street.
The forgotten observation could become evidence.
The inherited word could become a new resource.
The past remained the same.
But its possibilities did not have to remain the same.
The traveller sat down.
He began to trace a pattern in the earth.
An arrow pointing forward.
Then another.
Then another.
The gardener looked over his shoulder.
“What are you drawing?”
“A circle.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought time was a line.”
“And now?”
“Now I think becoming returns upon itself.”
The traveller wrote:
actualisation
Then:
transformed relations
Then:
possibility
Then:
actualisation
And beneath them, again:
transformed relations.
The gardener nodded.
“Not a circle of repetition.”
“No.”
“A spiral?”
“Perhaps.”
The traveller looked at the country.
“Each time it returns, the country is different.”
“Exactly.”
Something that became actual changed the relations of the world.
Those changed relations opened possibilities.
A participant took one up.
That actualisation changed the relations again.
And so the world did not merely move through time.
It changed its capacity for becoming.
The traveller stood.
He understood now why the present could not be a knife-edge.
A knife-edge divides.
But the present did something else.
It carried.
It opened.
It transformed.
It received the world that had become and gave that world new ways of becoming.
The gardener began walking down the hill.
The traveller followed.
They passed the old road.
They crossed the bridge.
They entered the city.
Everywhere they went, the traveller saw the same mystery.
The past was present.
But it was present as something transformed.
The future was present.
But it was present only as possibility.
And between them was becoming.
They reached the crossroads.
The gardener stopped.
“This is where we began.”
The traveller looked around.
He remembered standing here before.
But the crossroads was no longer the same.
Or perhaps it was the same, and he was no longer the same.
He looked down at the roads.
One had been widened.
Another had become a market street.
A third had almost disappeared.
New paths had appeared.
The country had changed because people had walked through it.
The traveller smiled.
“We never leave the present.”
“No.”
“It is always here.”
“Yes.”
“But it is never simply the same.”
“No.”
“Because what becomes changes what can become.”
The gardener nodded.
“And what can become may become.”
“And then?”
“It changes what can become next.”
The traveller looked toward the horizon.
For the first time, he did not see a boundary separating the present from the future.
He saw an opening.
And behind him, he did not see the past as a dead country.
He saw the foundations of the country beneath his feet.
He understood at last what he had been searching for since the beginning of his journey.
The present was not now.
It was not a point suspended between two absences.
It was not the thin line where one dead world ended and another had not yet begun.
It was a living country.
A country made from everything that had become.
A country opening toward everything that could become.
A country in which every new becoming might alter the relations through which earlier becomings continued to matter.
The traveller took a step.
The road received him.
He took another.
The country changed, if only by the smallest of amounts.
And somewhere behind him, the path he had walked had become part of the world another traveller might inherit.
He looked once more toward the horizon.
Then he understood the deepest secret of the country.
The past had made the present possible.
The present made futures possible.
And those futures, when they became actual, would become part of the present from which still other futures could open.
Nothing stood still.
Yet nothing simply disappeared.
What became remained.
What could become opened.
And becoming carried one into the other.
The traveller began walking.
He no longer asked where the present ended.
He knew now that the present had no such boundary.
It was the place where inheritance became possibility.
The place where possibility became actuality.
The place where actuality became a new inheritance.
The place where the world, having become what it was, became capable of becoming something else.
And as he walked, the traveller finally understood what the old gardener had been trying to tell him all along.
The present is not merely now.
It is:
what the world has become, becoming capable of what it has not yet become.
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