Just a lot of things to do

I'm listening to Leonard Cohen's new album Old Ideas. An early stanza from the song 'The Darkness' stands out with its plain-speaking directness & economy, and marvellously effective internal rhymes in lines 3 & 5. There is a Buddhist stripping away in this stanza & the song, and it reminds me of something Cohen said in an interview in 2005 about his time in a monastery ... "there you get so tired that you can’t pretend, and that’s all that a monastery is. They make you so tired that you give up pretending."

I got no future
I know my days are few
The present's not that pleasant
Just a lot of things to do
I thought the past would last me
But the darkness got that too.

Don't look back

"The pains people endure would be less if only ... they did not put so much imaginitive energy into recalling the memory of past misfortune, rather than bear an indifferent present with equanimity." - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther' (p.25, Penguin classic).

This is Buddhism.

The medieval idea of hope - at least as portrayed in Giuseppe Mazzotta's Yale lectures on Dante - as a belief that the future can redeem the past, is based on the idea that we do look back.

Which tribe was it that pictured us moving through time walking backward, because we look at the past and cannot see the future?

Which poet uses this?

Leonard Cohen talks about being blessed with a bad memory of his life.

Ingmar Bergman - in that late documentary Bergman Island - talks of a guilty conscious being an affectation.