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—'Twas but just now he went away I have not sine had time to shed a tear; And yet the distance does the same appear As if he had been a thousand years from me. Time takes no measure in Eternity.

~ Sir Robert Howard

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A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do.

Charles Lamb

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Truly, though our element is time, We are not suited to the long perspectives Open at each instant of our lives. They link us to our losses: worse, They show us what we have as it once was, Blindingly undiminished, just as though By acting differently we could have kept it so.

Philip Larkin, "Reference Back"

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from "Domesday Song," W. H. Auden

Jumbled in the common box Of their dark stupidity, Orchid, swan, and Caesar lie; Time that tires of everyone Has corroded all the locks, Thrown the key away for fun.

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Statesman Journal, Salem, Oregon, April 27, 1938

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The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are to-morrow’s past. Even now we slip away like those pictures painted on the moving dials of antique clocks—a ship, a cottage, sun and moon, a nosegay. The dial turns, the ship rides up and sinks again, the yellow painted sun has set, and we, that were the new thing, gather magic as we go. The whirr of the spinning-wheels has ceased in our parlours, and we hear no more the treadles of the loom, the swift, silken noise of the flung shuttle, the intermittent thud of the batten. But the imagination hears them, and theirs is the melody of romance.

~Mary Webb, Precious Bane

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Evening Public Ledger, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 11, 1919

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“Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.” -Charles Bukowski

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Music is not just in time. It does something with time... It is as if the even flow of time were cut up by the regularly recurrent sounds into short stretches of equal duration: the tones mark time. ~Victor Zuckerkandl, in Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

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“The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble – to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consumer nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.”

— Philip Connors

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Be Like the Past

You can’t just hate the present and long for the past, any more than you can make the future better by demanding of some nonexistent authority that they make it so. To make the future, you have to actually learn about the past, its glories and its follies alike, its conflicts and its contradictions. If we want to be like our forebears who successfully made it new, we have to, you know, be like them. We have to mine the incredibly rich resource of our past, and use that resource in whatever way we need to create new forms of art and politics, forms that are relevant to us. And then we have to hope that the future will treat us the same way, because then it will be alive. 

~Noah Millman, quoted by Alan Jacobs here

See also Josh Gibbs constant refrain: We learn history so that we can repeat it.

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A Temporal Home Base

To care only for things temporal is to lose the things eternal; but to attend rightly to things eternal is the royal road to constructive thought and action in the temporal realm. The great artists and thinkers cultivate a systolic/diastolic rhythm, tension and release, an increase and then decrease of pressure. In the latter phase they withdraw, by whatever means available to them, to their attentional cottage for refreshment and clarification — and then they can return to the pressures of the moment more effectively, and in ways non-destructive to them and to others. But most of us, I think, get the rhythm wrong: we spend the great majority of our time in systolic mode — contracted, tensed — and only rarely enter the relaxed diastolic phase. Or, to change the metaphor: We think we should be living in the chaotic, cacophanous megalopolis and retreat to our cottage only in desperate circumstances. But the reverse is true: our attention cottage should be our home, our secure base, the place from which we set out on our adventures in contemporaneity and to which we always make our nostos.

~Alan Jacobs

I've been thinking recently about two themes that are present in this post: social media and leisure. Both, I think, I'll address in separate essays later this summer.

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The Old Fortress of Arles

When Charlemagne was dead and Christendom almost extinguished the barbarian and the Saracen alternately built, and broke against, a keep that still stands and that is still so strong that one might still defend it. It is unlit. It is a dungeon; a ponderous menace above the main street of the city, blind and enormous. It is the very time it comes from.

Hilaire Belloc, Hills and the Sea

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I was refreshed, as though by the resurrection of something loved and thought dead. I was no longer afraid of Time.

Hilaire Belloc, Hills and the Sea

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A realm that embraces all times

The most [powerful] works of art, though they are the products of their time, transport us from our own time not only to theirs, but to a realm that embraces all times. We call Shakespeare timeless, but what we mean is that he is not shackled to the particular age from whence he arose—though he could have arisen in no other age but that one.

~Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child