None of the concepts of time we have examined disavow the fact that human beings perceive change of one kind or another. The "cold hard facts of modern physics," nevertheless, offer no support for the notion that the passing of time is anything more than illusory. This view is surprisingly consistent with that of Zen Master Dogen:

How like these words of a thirteenth-century Buddhist monk are to those of twenty-first-century Oxford mathematician and physicist, Roger Penrose!

If time neither passes nor flows, then appearances notwithstanding, past and present can be no more than the illusory bars of a conceptual cage from which intellectually honest minds must be liberated. We must learn to think outside that new-music box whose small, dim interior holds nothing but the tinseled hope of novelty and allow our creativity to expand without limit, freely embracing all periods and places. It is not in the dull void of specious innovation but only in the bountiful light of a consciousness transcending conventional notions of when and where that our art can truly grow and flourish.

On 1 April 1934 Albert Einstein and Arnold Schönberg were photographed together at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Schönberg, perplexed by the physicist's "Falsche Politik," once wrote, "Ich begreife Herrn Einstein nicht."