The Cream of the Jest by James Branch Cabell

He seemed, indeed, to find food for wonder everywhere. It was as if he had awakened from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really was, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness.

How poignantly strange it was that life could afford him nothing save consciousness of the moment immediately at hand! Memory and anticipation, whatever else they might do -- and they had important uses, of course, in rousing emotion -- yet did not deal directly with reality. What you regretted, or were proud of, having done yesterday was no more real now than the deeds of Caesar Borgia or St. Paul; and what you looked forward to within the half-hour was as nonexistent as the senility of your unborn great-grandchildren. Never was man brought into contact with reality save through the evanescent emotions and sensations of that single moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a second, which was passing now. This commonplace, so simple and so old, bewildered Kennaston when he came unreservedly to recognize its truth.