Flow of river/time

The common conception of time likens it to a flowing of a river -- a metaphor whose frequent use has led us generally to accept its applicability without realizing its confusion. Flowing implies change of place -- for example, the river flows from its source in the mountains down into the sea -- but change implies a situated observer without whom there can be no 'down' or 'from' or 'to' and, in short, no flow. Not only is there no flowing river existing in-itself, but its alleged temporal sequence is also profoundly misleading. whereas the metaphor assumes that the river flows out of the past towards the future, the tacit introduction of the necessary observer reverses the temporal sequence. As Merleau-Ponty points out, the water passing the observer surreptitiously stationed on the riverbank, is not pushed toward the future but rather, sinks into the past. Similarly for the observer tacitly assumed to be swept along by the current, the landscapes lying ahead are the future and the course of time is not the river itself but rather, the landscape rolling by. Since it presupposes a perspective , time is neither 'a flowing substance' nof a third person process to be recorded; on the contrary, TIME COMES INTO BEING FROM OUR RELATIONSHIP TO THE WORLD AND HAS NO EXISTENCE APART FROM THAT RELATION. ...... Unfortunately however, it undermines this insight by objectifying time -- which is not to say, of course, that the Kantian approach is any more valid in positing time as a pure form. ... Page 124

It suggests the water which will soon flow by is now making its way down the mountain, for example, which that which has just flowed past is presently further downstream. It is not a matter here of collapsing time by arguing -- as is frequently done -- that neither the past nor the future actually exists and that the present, strictly defined, is absolutely instantaneous and hence, being totally without extension, likewise in non-existent. On the contrary, by making the future pre-exist, the present exist and the past survive, the common sense view renders them all present in the objective world so that, conceived as existing in-itself, the world is completely full of 'instances of "now" '.... Page 125