In one of the many fine passages in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, the young brahmin - contemporary of Buddha, the Enlightened One - is sitting on the riverbank. It strikes him that once the measurement of time is waived, the past and the future are ever-present - like the river, which at one and the same moment exists not only where he sees it to be, but also at its source and at its mouth. The water which has yet to pass is tomorrow, but it already exists upstream; and that which has passed is yesterday, but it still exists, elsewhere, downstream.

- Tiziano Terzani