The Assault by Harry Mulisch

After the horrible incident that altered his life forever, only 55 pages in (gives me chills):
"All the rest is a postscript -- the cloud of ash that rises from the volcano, circles around the earth, and continues to rain down on all its continents for years."

The beginning of the last episode:
"And then...and then...and then...Time passes. 'That, at least, is behind us,' we say, 'but what still lies ahead?' The way we word it, it's as if our backs were turned to the past as we look toward the future; and that is, in fact, how we actually think of it: the future in front, the past behind. To dynamic personalities, the present is a ship that drives its bow throught the rough seas of the future. To more passive ones, it is rather like a raft drifting along with the tide. There is, of course, something wrong with both these images, for if time is movement, then it must be moving through another kind of time, and the secondary time through yet another; and thus time is endlessly multiplied. This is the kind of concept that does not please philosphers, but then, inventions of the heart have little to do with those of the intellect.

Besides, whoever keeps the future in front of him and the past at his back is doing something else that is hard to imagine. For the image implies that events somehow already exist in the future, reach the present at a determined moment, and finally come to rest in the past. But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute. Therefore such a person has his face turned toward the void, whereas it is the past behind him that is visible, stored in the memory." (p. 151, Random House, 1985)