Lipton’s Journal/February 22, 1955/665

Thus, the future exists materially in the thought-idea flow of man at actual past which we conceive inaccurately as clock-present. Put most crudely—what we think today is what in some form we do tomorrow.

The past, the social concretion, vanishes slowly. The horror of the past as Marx saw is that it is the dead incubus on the body of the future which lives in the present. One returns to the past, one studies it best in order to interpret and increase one’s sensitivity to the future. It is worth approaching the past only if one wishes to draw from it a finer extrapolation into the quality and quantity of the future.