What I lacked was the concept of a shared “now.” It was hard enough to keep on assembling a personal “now” out of the onslaught of incoming data—the angle of light, the need for lunch, the whispered forecasts of Edelman’s mood—although that is our fundamental task as sane and conscious beings, in fact it is what we are: momentary juxtapositions of incongruent events.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher]