“Love, which more than any other emotion exists in all four dimensions, is impossible without the gift of time. It cannot exist amid haste and confusion; or between people who parcel their affection into short periods. The most impassioned actions and assurances, when punctuated by days of coldness or distraction, are as puny in their own way as limp handshakes and pats on the head. We love only when we love across time, when love offered is love remembered and love promised.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 186)
“She carried about her that best of grandmotherly atmospheres—a sense of amplitude in Time. No hurry ever came near her. A whole series of episodes in my childhood show her peacefully reading, or dressing, or brushing the long white hair that could still touch her knees, while a babel of agitated voices urged departing carriages or trains. She always had a book in her hand and never seemed busy; she would put it down and her arms would open to enclose any human being, but particularly a child, who needed refuge there; what she gave was affection pure and simple, deliberately free from wear and tear of understanding or advice.”
Freya Stark, Traveller’s Prelude (via Time And The Art Of Living: Page 186)
“In writing your journal give primary attention to detail; for it is detail which organizes and preserves experience for your future self or some other reader. General statements like ‘We had a wonderful time’ or ‘It was a dismal morning’ make a mockery of the whole procedure, for they evaluate experience without recreating it. I kept long journals from ages ten to twenty-two, chronicling events and describing emotional states, but again and again missing the physical immediacy of experience, the tiny hooks by which experience could have been caught and held. I failed to record how we looked, what we saw, the minor eccentricities of circumstance which gave special character to a day. I ignored these elements not only through lack of training but through misplaced priorities: I mistakingly assumed that one could discuss the heart of things without discussing the surface of things.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 180)
“Regretting wasted time is itself a waste of time, an unconscious strategy of evasion.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 164)
“We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 164)
“Because work has temporal structure, we unconsciously associate leisure with temporal disorganization. And over this deadening rhythm is played, again and again, the same psychological bolero: Monday, the Day of Wrath; Tuesday and Wednesday, the grind; weary Thursday, across whose fallowness Friday, a prostitute-goddess of inexplicably renewable freshness, beckons with a promise of unspecified fulfillment. This promise is based on the lie that human nature, unfulfilled by work, can be fulfilled by leisure. Of course the promise is never kept; we spend Saturday and Sunday consecrating the week’s successes and failures to oblivion, in deepening dread of the Monday to come.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 156)
“The years forget our errors and forgive our sins, but they punish our inaction with living death.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 128)
“Thus at the beginnings of things it is well to treat ourselves to a luxury of blankness, to go into each day’s work without the deadening burdens of continuity, consistency and fixed purpose. Don’t look back; you will have time enough for that during later stages. At this point the essential things are amplitude, variety, boldness, imagination. Contradictions are not only allowable but essential; for without them you will almost always fail to transcend your initial understanding.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 122)
“Achievements like the writing of books, the painting of pictures, and indeed all long and cumulative indivisual efforts, are greater than the individuals who produce them, if we view these individuals at any single point in time. For no one can in a single moment recall the multitude of shapes his mind took during the course of the work, or revive the various intensisties of passion and calm which injected themselves into its production, or glow with the incremental power built up by weeks or months of care. The work resembels not the partial man, alone within the minutes, but the whole man, incorporate in time.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 122)
“People commonly assume that each passing second brings them closer to death; but this is largely and dangerously fallacious. The second in which a drowning man grabs hold of a life preserver or a starving man is offered a bowl of soup does not bring either closer to death but, rather, sharply away from it. People who undergo healthy conversions of habit cut abruptly away from death; wholesome exercise, from a physiological point of view, is not necessarily motion toward death at all. To say that such actions or activities merely delay death is a kind of sophistry; for since death is, in physical terms, a negative state, it is much more pertinent and correct to say that they prolong and increase life. Indeed, time has much less to do with death—for death is, as a cessation of motion, also a cessation of time—than it has to do with life, its most complex embodiment. Thinking that time brings death is less a workable assumption than a moral evasion, an example of our chronic tendency to ascribe our woes and weaknesses to external circumstances rather than to living will.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 118)
“Commonly old age brings on retirement from work; but in many cases it is truer to say that retirement brings on old age. The mind, like any other organ, retains and renews its strength only through exercise. In active life, whatever its negative stresses and trials, this exercise is emotional as well as rational, creative as well as defensive. The demands of communal effort constitute an irreplaceable exercise of mind, as does the state of being responsible or the state of being needed, no matter what the responsibility or the need. In retirement we lose these healthy activities, and the freedom we gain is often a poor exchange for the enervating vacuum of challenge, the dry rot of immobility which leaves us, month by month, less supple, less responsive and less vigorous. And even worse than this, to the extent that in active life we have established our own identity as social beings, we. become in retirement less and less ourselves.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 117)
“The idea of my own advancing age has never particularly bothered me, perhaps because my youthful years were much less enjoyable than the time I have now. But today, prompted by some new ache or wrinkle, my mind glanced onto the subject, and I was briefly invaded by a curious feeling. It was the same sort of mood that is cultivated by writers of thrillers, experienced by heroes who, early in the story, are knocked out or drugged, and awake to find themselves in wholly unfamiliar places, damp moldering cellars or drab rooms whose barred windows look out on alien courtyards, far from where the heroes’ friends or colleagues expect them to be, far from where they or anyone would want to be. They feel dismay, confusion and impotent anger, and these were what I momentarily felt; but in my case the feeling did not concern place but rather time. I felt stranded in my forties, a young spirit in a withering body. For a few instants I refused to acknowledge my body as my own, denied the connection between awareness and the protoplasm from which it springs. It was not until later that I realized taht this refusal, this anger, was the real crux of aging: that the pain of growing old lies specifically in the fact taht part of us does not grow old.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 113)
“An ordinary teacher weights and bags ideas like potatoes; a skilled teacher makes them open up like flowers from a bud.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 109)
“The act of concentrating on a given subject is, conversely, the act of temporarily forgetting everything else. This is one reason why, in most cases, highly successful people seem to be possessed of great calm and impressive reserves of energy. Capable of intense concentration on basic questions, they are not worn down by superficial difficulties, distracting side issues or the enervating friction of a divided mind. Professionally hard at work, they are psychologically on vacation: this is one case where conventional acheivement is completely in accord with mental and physical health.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 106)
“If you are fearful of some event in the future, and all reasonable efforts to calm your fear have failed, try worrying about it as intensely, lengthily and specifically as possible. The exhausting experience of worry, which is a kind of preliving of events, may well defuse your anxiety when the event actually occurs. In the same sense, conscious worry encourages us to formulate solutions to the problems we will be facing. At any rate, do not try to repress or stifle your fear of what is to come. This is a sure path to anxiety in action.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 103)
“Plans made swiftly and intuitively are likely to have flaws. Plans made carefully and comprehensively are sure to.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 102)
“The best we can do, I think, is not to pick nits but rather to consult broader purposes, taking time off every few days to review our position in life, evaluating the present in terms of past and future, memories and plans, and determining the ways in which recent and present choices may suggest larger patterns. In so doing, we rise temporarily above the ordinary flow of time and reacquaint ourselves with the larger pattern of forces which is our enduring identity.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 99)
“One of the chief benefits of games: liberation from all our other concerns. In this sense, games are more relaxing than relaxation: for when we ‘relax,’ we often open ourselves up to a hive of worries and impulses, but when we concentrate on a game, or anything else that is meaningful and definite, our life temporarily becomes simple and pure.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 94)
“Free space is useless without uncluttered time. Indeed, a nest of time need not require a special place at all: its only two requirements are that it concern some desirable activity and that it be, barring emergencies, inviolable.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 91)
“We generally save [expression of love] for special occasions, forgetting that love, which is the most precious form of human sustenance, is needed daily. We tend to grow amorous when we need love rather than when we sense that others need it. We are upset and annoyed by another person’s request for our love, feeling that it insults our emotional integrity; when in fact it is usually a healthy invasion of the coldness and distance which guard our egocentric lives. Victims of a romantic illusion which is itself a form of selfish crudeness, we ignore the fact that love can and should be offered by the mind and will as well as by the inspired emotions. By omitting the regular expression of love, we alienate ourselves from the common channels of understanding and sympathy with our fellows, and thus indeed with the sources of inspired emotion as well. We would do well to remember that small children, who express love and appeal for it many times each day, are in this not different from our own inner selves.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 89)