time
Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
East of Eden (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 73.
The feel of things, if I cherish, helps me live more like a minute than a clock.
This Clumsy Living (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007 ), 27.
Digging, raking, hoeing. Pruning a shaggy rose: shaping for future splendour. Dividing fat clumps of snowdrops: out of many shall come more still. And that was—is—the miraculous power of gardening: it evokes tomorrow, it is eternally forward-looking, it invites plans and ambitions, creativity, expectation. Next year I will try celeriac. And that new pale blue sweet pea. Would Iris stylosa do just here? Gardening defies time; you labour today in the interests of tomorrow; you think in seasons to come, cutting down the border this autumn but with next spring in your mind’s eye.
“‘So this is old age,'” The Guardian, October 4, 2013.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.
The Writing Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 32.
I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I’ll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at the time, seemed so important. Meetings that I was really worried about, things that I was getting calls four times a day about, and I wonder, “Where did it all go? Where are they now?” It’s so strange, everything has disappeared. The only thing that stays behind is the work.
Interview in How to Think Like a Graphic Designer, by Debbie Millman (New York: Allworth Press, 2007), 12.
In one of his poems, George Chapman, Shakespeare’s contemporary, compares time to a pollinating honeybee and the world to a flower garden, declaring strangely that “time’s golden thigh upholds the flowery body of the earth.” He explains that when we use time correctly it brings harmony and legitimacy to life. The verse ends with an aphorism: “The use of time is fate.” The phrase is inscribed on my workroom door. It’s in front of me now, in the flickering sunlight glancing off the river. The Use of Time Is Fate.
The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making (New York: Viking, 2012), 53.
Nothing can be done without solitude. I’ve created my own solitude which nobody suspects. It’s very difficult nowadays to be alone because we all own watches. Have you even seen a saint with a watch? Yet, I’ve looked everywhere for one even amidst the saints known as patrons of the watchmakers.
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, ed. by Dore Ashton (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 84.
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
Selections from Twelve Days (1928), in Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings, ed. by Mary Ann Caws (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 125.
Gently, Years, Gently!
“Flying Scrolls,” in The Skylark: and Other Poems (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959), 75.
Let’s understand that things are thieves of time because the more things you have, the more time you have to spend working to pay for them, the more your life is chained to a rhythm of perpetual purchase.
The 11th Hour, produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio; directed by Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen; released August 2007.
What you newspaper and magazine writers, who work in rabbit time, don’t understand is that the practice of architecture has to be measured in elephant time.
Said to a journalist, February 14, 1953, in Eero Saarinen on His Work, Aline Saarinen, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 9.
Life doesn’t hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had.
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 84.