By Robert Grudin. 1982.
Chapter 1: A Prospect of Time
Fast drivers can see no further than slow drivers, but they must look further down the road to time their reactions safely. Similarly, people with great projects afoot habitually look further and more clearly into the future than people who are mired in day-to-day concerns. These former control the future because by necessity they must project themselves into it, and the upshot is that, like ambitious settlers, they stake out larger plots and homesteads of time than the rest of us. They do not easily grow sad or old; they are seldom intimidated by the alarms and confusions of the present because they have something greater of their own, some sense of their large and coherent motion in time, to compare the present with.
In old magazines and newspapers we find a number of uncomfortably revealing things: the aged as young, the dead as living, forgotten people as celebrities, an array of our own barbarous and long-discarded fads and postures, and worst, visible only in this removed perspective, our own sickening pretensions to meaning and permanence.
Chapter 2: Bondage in Time
What do I mean by “locked in time”? I mean, first of all, that we characteristically view mobile phenomena in immobile terms. We see processes like love and education as established circumstances rather than as complex temporal organisms whose lives depend on regular nourishment and renewal. Conversely, we tend to accept our own fear, weakness and ignorance as chronic disabilities rather than facing them, as we should, with the awareness that they are temporary and surmountable.
We are insensitive to natural and historical cycles, and hence we are always being taken by surprise. We concern ourselves with superficialities, with the skin of time rather than its heart. An old tree falls, a landmark is torn down, a career takes a sudden leap or drop, a friend dies of a heart attack; and we view these events as great acts of time, rather than (more accurately) the surface results of processes which continue in all things.
More generally, our awareness is so isolated in present time–and only a part of the present for that matter–that we do not grant to the past and the future that sort of attention they deserve. We usually fail to understand that the present achieves full reality only when seen by those who retain the perspectives of past and future, that indeed no aspect of time is really available to us except in terms of the continuum. Psychologically, moreover, we are alienated from our past and future selves, or rather, from our past and future extensions of self.
Chapter 3: Past, Present, and Future
How will we, five or ten or twenty years hence, look back on present time? Most probably, with envy and regret. We will envy the younger self who could, relatively speaking, do so much; and we will regret that it did not do more. We will wonder why, given youth and health and broad reaches of time, we learned so little, loved so little, risked so little; how so much time could have drained so immemorially down the sink of routine and distraction.
Yet these regrets, however specifically realistic they are, ignore the broader continuity, which dictates that the confines of a single moment can hold all the dimensions and potentialities of time, and that the crucial decisions and opportunities are always before us, no less now than in the past, no less in the future then now.
Most people are trapped in the present, unequivocally divorced from the two embracing dimensions of time. We are so harassed by circumstance or bewildered by events that, like climbers clinging to a single niche, we hold on to the present as last resort; or we are so full of nameless and faceless anxiety that the past vanishes outright and the future looks like a nauseous pit.
As we grow older we wish more and more to be young again, to return to youth with the wisdom of age, or failing this, to get back to it any old way. We characteristically ignore a much more feasible kind of chronological magic–making present time slow its pace.
One divides the day into large natural periods, so that the future, though secure, is never nagging or imperious. One seeks the larger projects, the designs which extend our care and effort through weeks and months.
To those of us who spend entire days, if not lifetimes, concentrating on a series of brief and insignificant things, the present has barely any meaning out all; we become tiny timorous things, caught in the inch of space between the inbox and the outbox. While we may share the common illusions about a mobile present and a free future, we spend most of our lives housecleaning the past–maintaining commitments, counterbalancing errors, living up to expectations, mopping up our own postponements.
Among the many good reasons for making plans is the fact that the future can be enjoyed as fully as the present or the past. But most of what we enjoy, we enjoy specifically.
People suspect that planning will shackle them; but, with moderation, this is almost never the case. If you make plans, you may always do verge from them committing what is itself a pleasant act of freedom. If you do not make plans, you leave the future an empty field of chance, useless to the present, forfeit to your own unpredictable moods.
Chapter 4: Identity, Love and Time
People of understanding constantly derive energy and support from past and future selves. They revisit their past selves–their notes, sketches, achievements, memories–with affection and curiosity, regularly renewing contact with expressions of personality which are at once strange and familiar. They love making plans and beginning projects, either confident that future selves will improve and complete what they have begun, or if they are older simply tasting the pleasure and solace of futurity.
Just as one sends a letter from place to place, one may send, to one’s self or others, letters through time. Photographs, mementos and journal entries are letters we send into the future; and by writing or speaking about events gone by we can communicate to some extent with the past. To do this regularly and intelligently is to expand our being in time.
Chapter 9: Achievement
It is essential that the larger self, which stretches across decades, should frequently make contact with the smaller self, which labors from hour to hour. Memory should be exercised consciously in bringing about these encounters. The most profound function of memory is the reflex of identity.
In our projects we should always maintain a sense of the unfinished, a feeling that things are not final and that present action can almost always be improved or surpassed by future action. Characteristically, it is the illusion of finality, the illegitimate impulse to perfection, that renders us feeble and hesitant.
Chapter 10: Time and Art
Patience is no more than generosity with time; and the artist who is generous with time will be rewarded in turn. This is truest under the most extreme conditions, when the artist faces heavy difficulties and the project seems almost dead in the water. Here whole days seem barren; and despair beckons continually, in the form of total surrender, seductive distractions or voguish and facile charades of meaning. The patience shown at this point–the experiments, false starts, thrashings and reconsiderations which may take weeks–is probably the best-spent effort in the whole achievement; for aside from its material results, it is an irreplaceable affirmation of commitment.
Avoid worrying about whether what you write will be worth reading. Instead ask whether it is worth writing; and, if so, how it may best be written. Avoid worrying about whether what you write will be original. When all originality occurs at all (which is rare), it occurs as a by-product of conviction.