Yes... Yes they are... It's claiming that man has free will in a universe of materialistic causality, which he doesn't so its not a paradox at all. Man has a very cool way of experiencing the universe imagining himself to have free will, but materialistic causality kind of by definition means that we react to the material around us. Our very conciousness is material, as someone who often changes it by ingesting psychoative materials should be aware of that.
As for what time not being able to go backwards as to do with it I don't know.... He just said words cause they sounded fancy.
I'm terribly sorry if I'm being inane and shallow and can't see past the literal meaning and into the magical metaphorical duality of the of the poem that explains that we are both at the same time manifestations of the universe observing itself as well as the perciever's of reality and therefore reality is defined by how we perceive it to be. Who can really say what reality is, if we hold a certain perception of it to be true then there is no way of knowning that it is not. If we can conciouslly control what we think, we can control what we believe and therefore we can control reality, finally we cannot escape the deduction that I am God. If I am both the universe observing itself and God at the same time it can be deduced that the universe is God and creates itself and therefore every act of physical laws playing out is actually a concious act produced by the universe influencing the the laws that influence the materialistically based percption of man so that man indeed does have free will for it is his free will that is constantly changing the laws of physics to allow for a free will to exist. Oh and also I can make time go backwards
