I am the narrow neck of an hourglass. My place is called Now.

I exist mostly in a passive state, accepting the volley of events as they slip rapidly straight through me, like water on a grating. They are brief snapshots, informing my holder's consciousness, becoming his consciousness. Once these events pass, dropping quietly into an unemptying bowl of inaccesssibility, I cannot retrieve them. I may be fooled into thinking that I can, but I cannot. It's a trick, and it goes by the name Memory.

Sometimes my holder wishes for other events. And so he tilts me this way and that a bit. But in my spacetime of worldlines, so little is accessible. All that prevails is a short-lived mental experience of instantaneous changes in my Now place. And in time, that too will be lost. So right now, all I have is Now; or specifically, a small set of Now state changes.

I impel my holder therefore to reflect on that Now set again and again. If those few events which have just passed through me are in any way pleasing, then he must do his best to record them. Recording them is the only way for them to have any influence, however meagre, on my subsequent Now states. Indeed, that he must do.

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