But the only thing we ought to miss of youth are those youngest years when sensual pleasures still occurred without the noisy apparatus of memory at once stealing them from the present—the infinite present of animals and children—and photostamping them on index cards to be cataloged, reviewed, summarized in typed syntax, and (most devastatingly) immediately compared to all that has been and all that will be. One scarcely witnesses the present before it is drowned out by the caterwauling of machine pistons, obscured by the soot from memorial combustion: it powers the mind, it clouds the sky.”

— Mills Baker: A Machine for Simulating and Destroying the Present