Further:
The combination can only be this: that what prevents him being present in hope is memory, and what prevents him being present in memory is hope.
This is what it amounts to: on the one hand, he constantly hopes for something he should be remembering, his hope is constantly disappointed, but on its being disappointed he discovers that the reason is not that the goal has been moved further on but that he has gone past it, that it has already been experienced, or is supposed to have been, and has thus passed over into memory.
On the other hand, he constantly remembers something he should be hoping for; for in thought the future is something he has already taken up, he has experienced it in thought, and that which he has experienced is something he remembers instead of hopes for.
Consequently what he hopes for lies behind him, and what he remembers lies before him. His life is not backwards but back-to-front in two directions.
His life knows no rest and has no content, he is not present to himself in the moment, not present to himself in the future, for the future has been experienced, and not in the past, because the past has still not arrived.
Thus is he chased about, like Latona to the Hyperborean darkness, to the bright isle of the Equator, and cannot give birth and is constantly as though just about to.
Left to himself he stands in the wide world alone, he has no contemporaneity to attach himself to, no past he can long for, for his past has still not arrived, and no future he can hope for, for his future is already past.
