Anticline

“ His delay in lighting the torch was the unconscious delay of the suicide, secure in his resolution ere he lifts the poison to his lips—when life rises before him as a thing that is past, and he stands for one tremendous moment in the dark gap between the present and the future—no more the pilgrim of Time—not yet the inheritor of Eternity! ”

“ The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven by external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense is dreadful. ”

“ A good portion of my life is already mingled with the past eternity; and, for the future, it is a dim scene, on which my eyes are fixed as calmly and intensely as possible,—to no purpose. The probability of my doing any service in my day and generation is certainly not very strong. ”

“ But is there, in reality, any such thing as a Past or a Future? If there is any such thing as Eternity, it now is and always has been and ever must be. [113] Time is a mere delusion: a false medium, through which we look at things askant. ”

“ The logical consequence was to make dying the chief end of living. Who cannot remember being told to despise the present, to consider how brief it is, like a cloud before the dawn of the endless day? It was compared to the short waiting outside some door beyond which was warmth, cheer, and unending bliss. So that the pious soul thought of life only in terms of waiting, watching, enduring. ”

“ We think of a small motion of the dial as of an eternity; yet ages have past, and they are but hours; the present moment will soon be only a memory, an unseen atom in the night of by-gone time. A hundred years hence, and young and old we shall all be gathered to the dust, and I shall no longer feel the coil that is at work in my heart, or any longer struggle within the inextricable bonds of fate. ”

“ She did not know, poor girl, in her ignorance, of the changes and chances that are continually going on in the world, where the greatest pleasures and the severest pains and trials last but for a season, and they are gone, and old Time keeps on the even tenor of his way, and pains and pleasures live only in the memory, and fade away as time rolls on, leaving, in the end, but a faint shadow of the past. ”

“ For delay there was, though of a few hours only; and this delay was caused by my uncomfortable new habit—pausing for the guidance and the "thrill." Intuition, waiting upon the thrill of Beauty that guided it, at first lay inactive. ”

“ As, in this life, consciousness is interrupted by sleep and by accidents, so the temporal processes, in whatever variety they have, which fulfil in their wholeness and in their relations to the eternal order the life of an individual, may be, for all that I can see, in any one of a large number of relations to us and to one another, — contemporaneous, continuously successive, or discontinuously successive, with temporal gaps of any magnitude. ”

“ It had been natural to delay and muse the day before, recalling what sweet moments there might be in the past, imagining what might be in the future; but now, when all is over, with what an impulse the man works at his occupation, to fill the void, to hasten, if he could, the very movement of the earth, till the time of meeting again. ”

“ Every chain must wear out in time. Mine was worn to attenuation before to-night—this last blow snaps it. To-morrow, when the world wakes to its petty round of cares and joys, my troubles will be over. ”

“ Alas, all that he had to do was to go back to the silent house, to meet and go through that awful day of waiting—that day in which nothing can be begun or done—in which all is waiting, in which every hour seems a whole day, although one would give one’s life to prolong that which this endless steady slow succession of flying moments is carrying away. ”

“ THE CONSENT.
It is the past that maketh my despair;
The dark, the sad, the irrevocable past.
Alas! why should our lot in life be made,
Before we know that life? Experience comes,
But comes too late. ”

“ It is well if, by tasting such sorrows as mine—and they are many—I am taught to avoid the far greater and more permanent evils of futurity. In this world, we are suspended over the abyss of eternity, by a thread which grows more feeble every hour; and all events should be welcome which are ordained by infinite wisdom, to prepare me for that hour when my place on earth shall be vacant, and my place in eternity—in a ceaseless eternity, shall be filled. ”

“ The contemplation of the final judgment, and the sentence to be passed upon the wicked, is truly a solemn one, and should startle every mind, But oh, how few, comparatively, seem to stop and reflect upon this momentous subject? And yet all are rapidly hastening on to their final doom. Few are aware of the vast numbers that are passing from time into eternity—even each year, each month, each day each hour, or each minute. ”

“ For a time thought seems to be suspended, and there is nothing but the frightful burst of explosions, during which one cannot think. And then comes a period of dulled senses—dulled to the present, and taking one into the past. ”

“ It is only at moments when, for example, we reflect that our action of a minute ago is already a part of the mysterious past, sinking downwards, and rapidly becoming invisible in the depths of the infinite ocean, that we are startled by a momentary pang, and feel as though to live with a constant sense of our insignificance would be to risk the paralysis of all our powers of thought and action. ”

“ Yet Time, forsooth, wrests even this anchorage from you. Comes an hour when, confronted by the inevitable, helpless in its grip, unreconciled even in your resignation, you dully stand by a bedside and wait—wait—wait. ”

“ These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. ”

“ Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a dream. ”

“ Shall we stand talking here instead of acting, when every moment of delay increases your danger? Come! As I carried you hither, in defiance of all, so will I carry you hence again at once while yet there is time. ”

“ Oh the slow agony of waiting! the torture of enumerating minutes—each minute seemingly an age—the dull, heart-sickening suspense of awaiting tidings—tidings which the heart tells us—the heart, too faithful prophet of the future—cannot by possibility be good; while reason interposes her vain veto to the heart’s decision, and hope uplifts her false and siren song. ”

“ Who has told you when your last hour will come? Do you think death will approach you like a post-rider, blowing a horn from time to time to give notice of his coming? Not by any means! You must know that not only does our eternal destiny depend on a single moment, but also it is quite uncertain when that moment will come. Any minute of our lives may be the last. ”

“ Such lively counterfeitings of the older life, such deeply-laid plans, dispersed in a moment by sudden changes of purpose, such profound gravity upset by the merest chance interruption, such perpetual busyness without thought of rest. ”

“ Were we cursed with prevision, could we know how, when the idle trifle of the present hour shall have been forged into a link of the past, it will stretch out and bind captive the whole future in its bonds, we should be paralysed, hopeless, powerless, old ere we were young! ”

“ Consider, that as all time is short, and passes quickly away, so all temporal enjoyments, honours, riches and pleasures of this world, are all transitory, uncertain and inconstant. Only eternity, and the goods or evils which it comprises, are truly great, as being without end, without change, without comparison ”

“ The minute which is gone can never be recalled, while the next minute is fraught with uncertainty. We are sure—not of this minute, but of this instant only, of time. Then, while we may, let us say the loving word, do the kind act, suppress the unkind remark, encourage those who are struggling by the way—this minute. ”

“ For we have every one of us felt how a very few minutes of the months and years called life, will sometimes suffice to place all time past and future in an entirely new light; will make us see the vanity or the criminality of the bygone, and so change the aspect of the coming time that we look with loathing on the very thing we have most desired. ”

“ People talk of our changing every seven years, but they make me feel as if I changed every seven minutes. What will you have, at any rate, and how can I help it? It's the grind of life, the wear and tear of time and misfortune. ”

“ And I realized suddenly, for the first time, the relentlessness of time and the inevitability of change. I understood that I could not resist, and what that meant.
Something was passing, a door was closing, and nothing in the world could hold it open. Hugo was helpless, and I was helpless; and every one. We could not stand still and we could not go back ”

“ Time itself was a nightmare of running, falling, rising, staggering, running again until the blood pounded in her temples, drummed in her ears. The cry came again, as near as before—nearer? Throughout the night as she struggled on she could always fancy the stealthy, silent feet following her, keeping time with her own. ”

“ Years appear long while yet at a distance; arrived, they vanish, they slip from us in an instant; and scarcely shall we have looked around us, when, as if by enchantment, we shall find ourselves at the fatal term, which still appeared so distant that we rashly concluded it would never arrive. ”

“ There is no standard by which time can be measured, but the succession of our thoughts, and the changes that take place in the external world: from the latter I was totally excluded; the former made the lapse of some hours appear like the tediousness of weeks and months. At length a new sensation recalled my rambling meditations, and gave substance to my fears: I now felt the cravings of hunger, and perceived that, unless my deliverance were speedily effected, I must suffer a tedious and lingering death. ”

“ Was he professing to her in any degree the possession of an aftersense that wasn't real? How in the world could he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his greatest reality? That was at bottom all that there was between them, and two or three times over it made the hour pass. ”

“ The moment a given phase is reached, it is departed from, or ceases. In these perpetual movements the present can scarcely be said to have any existence, for as the Past is ending, the Future has begun. ”

“ What is it that obliges me to wait, and to wait for a certain length of psychical duration which is forced upon me, over which I have no power? If succession, in so far as distinct from mere juxtaposition, has no real efficacy, if time is not a kind of force, why does the universe unfold its successive states with a velocity which, in regard to my consciousness, is a veritable absolute? ”

“ Circumstances mould our lives so strangely and capriciously, that we are ever doing things, which in after moments surprise ourselves those unplanned, unplotted, spontaneous deeds of ours that spring from the natural source of action, directly as it is influenced by some passing circumstance of moment! ”

“ For the essential bitterness and pain that lies at the heart of all transitory earthly things—the gnawing sense of incompleteness and vanity that touches the section of transitory existence men call "life," met face to face with this passing glimpse of reality, timeless and unconditioned, which the sound of the splendid name flashed so terrifically before his awakened soul-vision,—and threatened to overwhelm him. ”

“ How rapid as we go on in life becomes the awful beat of each recurring year! When the feeling of novelty has grown rare, and when interests have lost their edge, time glides by with an ever-increasing celerity. ”

“ But impatience of the way and the wayfaring was to disappear from a later century—an age that has found all things to be on a journey, and all things complete in their day because it is their day, and has its appointed end. ”

“ It is certain, I confess it, that there are hours when terrible signs appear to me. Perhaps, indeed, the end of time is nigh, and we shall witness that fall of the old world with which others threaten us. ”

“ Accordingly we must press forward, not only because every day we are drawing nearer to death, but also because the apprehension of events and the ability to adapt ourselves to them begin to wane before the end. ”

“ To such people the knowledge of previous existences is as much a matter of consciousness as the fact of the existence of last year—yesterday—a moment ago—or even the present moment, which slips away while we attempt to consider it. ”

“ Come not all things at their appointed time, neither sooner nor later than they are due? In the divine drama of the universe the curtain never falls until the play is finished. In our short-sightedness we say our friend died too soon, or his good fortune came too late; but we are in error. Everything is part of the eternal plan, and to be out of time or place an impossibility. ”