Looking on the happy autumn fields and thinking of the days that are-no more. - Tennyson, "Tears, Idle Tears"
-All our past acclaims our future. -
Swinburne
He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not
know that it was already behind him, some where back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic
rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no mattertomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ....And one fine momingSo we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. - Fitzgerald, Gatsby
Epochs which immediately
precede our own are temporarily father away from us than others more remote in time. -
Stravinsky
"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth ...."
"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago - the other day ... Light came out
of this river since - you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash oflightning in the clouds. We live in
the flicker - may it last as long as the old 'earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday .... " - Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Time Present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden. - Eliot, Four Quartets
The scene is memory and is therefore unrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are
exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the article it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior
is therefore rather dim and poetic. - Williams, The Glass Menagerie, stage directions
I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.
To begin with, I turn back time. -
Williams, Menagerie
And so it is with our own past. It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The
past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material
object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on change whether we come upon it or not before we
ourselves must die.
If, at least, there were granted me time enough to complete my work, I would not fail to stamp it with the seal of that Time the
understanding of which was this day so forcibly impressing itself upon me, and I would therein describe men ...as occupying in Time a
place far more considerable than the so restricted one allotted them in space, a place, on the contrary, extending boundlessly since,
giant-like, reaching far back into the years, they touch simultaneously epochs of their lives - with countless intervening days between
- so widely separated from one another in Time. - Proust. reserche du temps perdu
For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night, eating her heart
out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar,
they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven - over. It was June. - Woolf,
Mrs. Dalloway