Chapter 6: The Present Part I

This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. ... as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This vaguely certain kind of recognition to an almost forgotten lover. There is a delight and there is a sadness. The present will always slip away. But the memories will not. You can hold on to them, at least, for as long as time allows you to. 

Consciousness itself does not hinder living in the present. Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people--the novelist's world, not the poet's. ... Innocence is a better world. What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. 

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 

As an afterthought I add this in. It's so me, the glimpse I cast myself on a storefront window, how we are constantly turning around to see if we're being seen. But what does it matter--as long as you're living in the present and at that moment? You're true then.