“Back home in the Wild West, time whips by with the relentless and terrible purpose of a strangling vine filmed in fast motion. A week, two months, ten years snap past like amnesia, a continual barrage of workdays, appointments, dinner dates and laundromats, television shows and videocassettes, parking meters, paydays and phone calls. You can watch it from Asia. You read the newspapers, you think about your friends back home — marching along in the parade of events — and you know it’s still happening. It’s happening there. On the other side. Yesterdays, todays and tomorrows are tumbling after each other life Sambo and the tiger, blending into an opaque and viscous ooze. There is no such thing as now; only a continual succession of laters, whipping their tendrils around the calendar. The clutches of the vine… In Nepal the phenomenon is reversed. Time is a stick of incense that burns without being consumed. One day can seem like a week; a week, like months. Mornings stretch out and crack their spines with the yogic impassivity of house cats. There is time enough to do everything — write a letter, eat breakfast, read the paper, read a shrine or two, listen to the birds, bicycle downtown, change money, buy postcards, shop for Buddhas — and arrive home in time for lunch.”
–Jeff Greenwald, Shopping for Buddhas (1990)