What he meant by that is a matter for conjecture. It may mean that the present is not convenient for dreaming, an activity which should be put off to some future date. Or, more likely, it implies that our unfulfilled wishes and visions of grandeur to come are best shuffled forward to some tomorrow when they may or may not come true.

Whatever, it’s a nice turn of phrase that leads me to the subject of the future. In this case, I’m thinking about the future in the past tense – the way I dreamed about it long before I reached my sixth decade of life. If that makes even less sense than M. France’s aphorism, please permit me to elaborate. (WARNING: Whenever you experience someone writing or saying “Let me elaborate” or “Permit me to explain,” it is an automatic signal to yawn and excuse yourself. However, in this case, I promise you the immediate future holds some remarkable revelations and brilliant interpretations.)

When I was young – in those ancient mists of post-World War II days – the generalized future seemed a bright promise of peace, happiness and a burgeoning technology yielding to mankind’s every desire and command.

Television was a fresh-faced infant foretelling an age of communication that would soon eliminate such anachronisms as newspapers and magazines and those big screen fantasies shown in movie theaters. Not contemplating my career in journalism at that time, I looked forward to the day when we would sit in our climate-controlled plasticine domiciles experiencing the knowledge and culture of the ages without having to shift from our comfortable reclining massage-exercisers.

I presumed the engineers and technologists would have all the bugs worked out by no later than 1955.

Alas, the future dream succumbs to present reality.

Here I sit at a typewriter keyboard containing the same configuration of keys devised by some slightly deranged inventor in the mid-1800s, although admittedly it’s attached to a new-fangled computer with a nice display screen.

In the evenings, my television set has the same type of news I watched back in the 1950s, except now it’s in color and delivered with great show-biz pizzazz by a group of chummy multinationals who chuckle and dance their way through flood and famine, death and destruction.

And the emphasis on wisdom and culture is exemplified by such fare as “TV’s Censored Bloopers,” “Wheel of Fortune” and “The Jerry Springer Show.” I liked “Four Star Theater” in black and white better than most of this stuff. And what ever happened to Milton Berle?

Well, we hardly have to press the point regarding 1990s culture and communications.

In the days of my youthful dreams, the jet plane had just come into its own. Transportation, my mental conjurations told me, would soon be by individual non-polluting jets across perfectly preserved landscapes from gleaming crystal city to the untouched environments of vacation escape.

Surely, by 1960 this would all come to pass.

Dream on.

Today I’m driving a huffing, smoke-belching Dodge Shadow which has very much the same engineering as my father’s 1947 Chrysler Newport, except it gets slightly less mileage and has more automatic equipment to malfunction.

The highways and parking lots, bigger, better and greater in number though they be, are the same old blends of tar and stone concocted by John L. McAdam in the 1800s, tracing ugly black ribbons and patches where there once were trees and grass and flowers.

No doubt, much progress has been made in the past four or five decades. But I still feel more confusion that enlightenment from the improved forms of communication. I still have to drive a gasoline-powered vehicle over traffic-clogged former Indian trails. I still eat mashed potatoes and hamburgers. I still can’t find enough time to read “Ulysses,” recently designated the most important novel ever written in English by a panel of erudite writers and editors.

Yes, as old Anatole said, the future is a convenient place for dreams. But, otherwise, it’s not so convenient at all.

(And you really should have yawned and excused yourself up there at paragraph four. It would have saved a little bit of the future which you have now squandered on broken dreams.)