Future. Tense.

Excerpt from The Screwtape Letters

“The humans live in time but our Ene­my des­tines them to eter­ni­ty. He there­fore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eter­ni­ty itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touch­es eter­ni­ty. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an expe­ri­ence anal­o­gous to the expe­ri­ence which our Ene­my has of real­i­ty as a whole; in it alone free­dom and actu­al­i­ty are offered them. He would there­fore have them con­tin­u­al­ly con­cerned either with eter­ni­ty (which means being con­cerned with Him) or with the Present — either med­i­tat­ing on their eter­nal union with, or sep­a­ra­tion from, Him­self, or else obey­ing the present voice of con­science, bear­ing the present cross, receiv­ing the present grace, giv­ing thanks for the present pleasure.

“Our busi­ness is to get them away from the eter­nal, and from the Present. With this in view, we some­times tempt a human (say a wid­ow or a schol­ar) to live in the Past. But this is of lim­it­ed val­ue, for they have some real knowl­edge of the past and it has a deter­mi­nate nature and, to that extent, resem­bles eter­ni­ty. It is far bet­ter to make them live in the Future. Bio­log­i­cal neces­si­ty makes all their pas­sions point in that direc­tion already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in mak­ing them think about it, we make them think of unre­al­i­ties. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eter­ni­ty. It is the most com­plete­ly tem­po­ral part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eter­nal rays.… Hence near­ly all vices are root­ed in the future. Grat­i­tude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambi­tion look ahead.…

“To be sure, the Ene­my wants men to think of the Future too — just so much as is nec­es­sary for now plan­ning the acts of jus­tice or char­i­ty which will prob­a­bly be their duty tomor­row. The duty of plan­ning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its mate­r­i­al is bor­rowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present.… But we want a man hag-rid­den by the Future.… We want a whole race per­pet­u­al­ly in pur­suit of the rainbow’s end, nev­er hon­est, nor kind, nor hap­py now, but always using as mere fuel where­with to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.”