Our mental model is that we look into the future; the past is behind us. I was told that the Chinese see things quite differently: they look at the past, and the future washes over them, which seems to me to be much more sensible. There's a kind of peacefulness in that attitude that I appreciate. You're standing in one place, or treading water in one place, and meanwhile the drift of things is coming past you from behind. As the events recede, they cluster into bigger groups and become generalities, so you have this nice transition of specific events to a background of generalities. (Brian Eno, qtd in Tamm, 86)

In a 1994 discussion of how to think about and name Danny Hillis's millennial Clock, Eno suggested, "How about calling it 'The Clock of the Long Now,' since the idea is to extend our concept of the present in both directions, making the present longer? Civilizations with long nows look after things better. In those places you feel a very strong but flexible structure which is built to absorb shocks and in fact incorporate them." (29)

Since the early 1980s, Eno has been preoccupied with working out a theory of "culture as a system of knowledge . . . as a system of evolution in the same way that you might talk about genetics as a system of evolution. [. . .] He sees all human culture as a system for the transfer of information, directly analogous to genetics, in the sense that "all creatures transmit information about their environment genetically." (87)

Eno's Long Now places us where we belong, neither at the end of history nor at the beginning, but in the thick of it. We are not the culmination of history, and we are not start-over revolutionaries; we are in the middle of civilization's story. (31)

[I]n this century alone we have gone from less than 1 per cent of humanity being able to survive in any important kind of health and comfort to 44 per cent of humanity surviving at a standard of living unexperienced or undreamed of before. This utterly unpredicted synergistic success occurred within only two-thirds of a century despite continually decreasing metallic resources per each world person. It happened without being consciously and specifically attempted by any government or business. It also happened only as a consequence of man's inadvertently becoming equipped synergistically to do progressively more with less. (102-103)

"Doing more with less"--Buckminster Fuller's "ephemeralization"--is creating vastly more efficient industrial and agricultural processes, with proportionately less impact on natural systems. It is also moving ever more of human activity into an infosphere less harmfully entwined with the biosphere. (134)

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. (23)

The product of even the most imaginative and prudent forethought is not certainty but surprise. This is the reward for infinite-game generosity. Surprise plus memory equals learning. Endless surprise, diligent memory, endless learning. (163)