Past and Present

You work your way down, or not so much down as within, into the interior of the present, until finally you come to that beginning in which all things, the world and the light itself, at a word welled up into being out of their absence. And nothing is here that we are beyond the reach of merely because we do not know about it. It is always the first morning of Creation and always the last day, always the now that is in time and the Now that is not, that has filled time with reminders of Itself.

-Wendell Berry, Fidelity, 4-5. 

Time...is Marching On

Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.

-Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, 320.

Now, Now and Now and Now

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

-Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter, 148.

Same Thing, Every Spring

Dan, go get your jacket
It's still a little cold outside
And don't play in mud, you'll track it
And I just cleaned inside
Momma don't need a coat, he yells
As he heads down to the game
Where the field is dressed seductively
In puddles of old rain
Same thing, every Spring

All kinds of life is sproutin
Flyin round, some getting scarfed
Like mommas having babies
And their heads are popping off
Well Nate taught that to Sally
Who then taught it to Nadine
Who couldn't quite get the hang
Of poppin em off real nice and clean
Same thing, every Spring

It's time to open up the shed
Wake the hibernating bears
Old grizzly and old kodiak
Are a couple of our John Deers
It's time to plant the seeds
But the garden dirt's too hard
We'll have to borrow Andy's tiller
Ours got rusted in the yard
Same thing, every Spring

Well April has it's showers
So May has buttercups
And the birds sing every morning
That the earth is warming up
So we gather all the sweaters
All the mittens and the coats
Don't open til October
On the box somebody wrote
Same thing, every Spring

No matter how we try
To live our lives beyond the same
We'll always have the dandelions
And the puddles of old rain
Well me I kind of like the thought
There's really nothing wrong
So winter won't you join with me
A few bars of this old song
Same thing every Spring

-Ticklepenny Corner

The Wizard's Pupil

TIME like a sullen school-boy stands
Beside the Wizard's knee,
The book of life between his hands,
And spells out painfully
The crabbed Christ-cross row,
The Alpha and the O.

His grimy fingers slowly trace
Each odd, repellent sign
In a dull fear to lose the place;
His voice, with listless whine,
Drawls through the scheduled hour
The syllables of power.

While Zeta is so like to Xi
Small thought has he to spare
For what the screed may signify,
(The Wizard in His chair
Smiles, knowing ere He look
All that is in the book).

But sometimes ill and sometimes well,
Reluctant and perplexed,
He gropes and stammers through the spell
From one sound to the next;
And when the last is read
God's Word wakes the dead.

-Dorothy Sayers

Time

One of the great myths of life is that childhood passes quickly. In fact, because time moves more slowly in Kid World—five times more slowly in a classroom on a hot afternoon, eight times more slowly on any car journey of more than five miles (rising to eighty-six times more slowly when driving across Nebraska or Pennsylvania lengthwise), and so slowly during the last week before birthdays, Christmases, and summer vacations as to be functionally immeasurable—it goes on for decades when measured in adult terms. It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.

-Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, 29.

Mañana

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

-William Shakespeare, MacBeth

Good Manners

Curtsy while you're thinking what to say, it saves time.

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass