A different way of looking at the past

The early Greek imagination envisaged the past and the present as in front of us -- we can see them. The future, invisible, is behind us ... Paradoxical though it may sound to the modern ear, this image of our journey through time may be truer to reality than the medieval and modern feeling that we face the future as we make our way forward into it

Bernard Knox, Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal