What’s happening now is what happened before, and often what’s going to happen again sometime or other.
“A person who is doing literary writing must deal in emotion-charged symbols – and so you end up writing about things like death and lions and sacramental meals, perhaps because those are emotional things that wake certain feelings in the deep spring of the individual. I’m using it as I have to, to engage and stir the reader’s emotions. And if fiction doesn’t do that, then it’s failed. That’s the purpose of fiction.”
Gene Wolfe