While for the most part these twin sisters are nothing short of bonkers, I liked when one of them questioned the tyranny of time, speaking with splendid disregard for the sun of day and moon of night. For other examples of their more eccentric exchanges, see how they...
I liked this sharp injunction to Dante to hurry up and spit it out. You can imagine an impatient parent or schoolmaster snapping at a nervous, faltering child, a chronological equivalent to the commonly heard exasperation: ‘I’m not made of money, you...
Henry Miller is himself a wonderful writer, and this comment about a critical element of successful story-telling took me by surprise. While I am not sure what to make of it, I’ve also turned it over in my mind to see if it would serve as a license to take...
Yes, there is much you can do to transmute mud into brightness if you have enough time. I love the variety of interpretations I find regarding time and our relationship to it, and here it is cast at its most helpful, as the element that can ‘ripen all’. Of...
Jesus lays out a few ground rules to Judas whom, it seems, could have done with a dose of quinuituq. I loved this lesson in patience, and the idea that men and trees are bound by the same laws of God. “If you love me, be patient. Look at the trees. Are they in...
Any absorbing activity has this magical effect of taking you almost outside of time, until you look at the clock and feel as if it’s speeded ahead. It seemed appropriate to share this after we have put the clocks forward for summer. ‘Time never passes so...
A fascinating insight into how we fold our perceptions of time into language, or language influences such perceptions. It made me realise that my assumptions about time, how I engage with and experience it, may have been strongly shaped by the languages I grew up...
Another angle on language and how it shapes or at least influences our perception of time. Here Adam Nicolson discusses the anchoring of tense in many languages, while others allow things to happen in a more imprecise location in time. ‘The sky is the great...
The past is a place which enriches me in almost all I do, and I love travelling there as much as I love travelling abroad. As Henry Miller said, it ‘fructifies the present’, and I see history as a vertical version of geography – a place you can...
A heartening description of time as the great irrigator of the world. See another such ripening interpretation by Kazantzakis. ‘Time ran on like immortal water, and irrigated the world.’ Source: Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation, trans. P.A....
A striking metaphor for time hovering or collapsing, in two versions of a bird, alive and flying, or keeling and dying. ‘Time still hovers above the tundra like the rough-legged hawk, or collapses altogether like a bird keeled over with a heart attack, leaving...
The more I connect with the past, the more I connect with the present, and I liked this use of quietness as a way to ‘feel the slope of time’. And yes, how far we have come from Mesopotamia, but similarly, how far back we go, both to and beyond...
How many of us live day to day doling out time fretfully! I liked this alternative, easy, generous, striding engagement with time, allowing you to traverse other vastnesses confidently. ‘If the mind releases its fiduciary grip on time, does not dole it out in a...
While I have seen many comments on the elasticity of experienced time, this is the first one connecting its length or shortness with whether the time is spent doing or thinking. I can’t immediately see the correlation, as it would surely depend on what it is you...
