Dear Marion,

Please permit me this amendment to my letter of
earlier today. I just awoke from 2 hours' sleep.
Whether the sleep left my mind a bit clearer
or even foggier than ever, is for you to decide.

I consider Charles Darwin a grown-up child,
because the tenacity of a child's memory
draws the child's past into its present. 
The child's consciousness of the present is the concatenation
of what for the adult will become
a separate past and a separate present and a separate future.
Therefore time has a different meaning for the child,
or perhaps no meaning at all.
The child's present extends infinitely into the past.
It also extends infinitely into the future.
The child's present is forever:
that's why she/he is so unbearably impatient.
It's only as she/he grows older
that time becomes mobilized and starts to pass,
the present shrinks, time begins to fly,
the future becomes unknown,
and the past becomes inaccessible.

Finally, when it's time to die,
the future is blotted out and
the past is totally out of reach.
No longer is there a past to be drawn into the present.
Once more, the present is all there is and nothing else remains,
the present has lost its boundaries,
and as biological life itself is extingished,
in consciousness, in spirit, life at its end
as at its begining, comes to appear eternal.
q.e.d.