“We generally have a volcanic attitude toward our own intrafamily annoyances and frustrations, not expressing them openly until they have grown so strong that it is impossible either to put them sensibly or hold them back. The eruption usually either provokes or occurs during a family squabble, when all parties involved have lost their tempers or are scared stiff. At these times no one listens carefully, and criticisms are exaggerated; we tend to characterize the actions which upset us, not as temporary and reparable failings, but as the products or ingrained vice or genetic debility. Thus expressed, our anger not only fails to correct disorder but rather becomes an injury which prolongs it. To say that we lack self-control is not enough. What we lack is the courage and providence to have expressed ourselves sooner.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 88)
“People who make moral compromises in order to achieve good ends find that their compromises irrevocably alter the ends achieved. Thus they learn that, in a world of process, it is method rather than goal which carries the burden of moral value; that in the final analysis nothing should be mistaken either for a means or for an end.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 80)
“Written history is composed of actions; real history is actions compounded invisibly with refusals to act.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 68)
“Every home should have a room, or at least a nook with two chairs, where it is a sin punishable by immediate expulsion to speak of money, business, politics or the state of one’s teeth.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 59)
“The birth of our second child is one, maybe two weeks away. The coming event looms over us, the way a big wave looms over a little boat; and our days are dimmed by its shadow. The future can exert this force upon us, can totally suck the juice out of the present, turning it into something tense, dry, useless to memory. How can we enjoy or profit from usch a transitional state? The practical answer is ‘Don’t sit and wait; prepare.’ The subtler answer is that no period in life is more or less transitional than any other, had we only the power to understand each.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 41)
“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 at all; we become tiny timorous things, caught in the inch of space between the ‘in’ box and the ‘out’ box. While we may share the common illusions about a mobile present and a free fuutre, we spend most of our lives housecleaning the past—maintaining commitments, counterbalancing errors, living up to expectations, mopping up our own postponements. In this sense, as in others, we shuffle backward into the future, unaware of our enslavement to time or of the simple freedom of new beginnings.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 39)
“Because we believe that one moment is more or less like the next, we lose touch with the essential urgency of the present, the fact that each passing moment is the one moment for the practice of freedom.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 38)
“You have a day to spare and wish to use it well. You see yourself in a kind of compartment of time whose immediate walls are last night’s and tonight’s sleep. Look beyond these walls and back at the present from imaginary mirrors placed in the past and the future. Think of the choices and events which brought you where you are; think of what you once wished or expected to have achieved by this point. Imagine what you will think of this period some time in the future. Will you think or do anything today that is worthy of future memory? Try to make the present memorable; or, failing this, review daily what is important about the present period in your life. In so doing you will enrich time.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 26)
“Our days and our lives are pathetically shortened by miscellaneous abuses and confusions of time. We are novices at the art of making plans and have trouble remembering the plans we have made. We ignore the time that is open to us. We diminish ourselves by wishing time to pass. We are, for the most part, incapable of real concentration. Our days are broken by distraction, scrambled up into muddles of chores, errands, impulses, evasions, interruptions and delays, besotted with routine. We characteristically fail to see the ways in which a given period can be expanded, deepened and slowed by the exercise of will and awareness. Deprived of this power and isolated from continuity, we often feel small, momentary, almost transparent, like paper-thin façades of being.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 20)
“Each day is a minor eternity of over 86,000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos. A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby’s conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 7)
“Rooms can be vessels of psychologoical temporality, silently encouraging specific attitudes toward time: The furniture of the past: shelved books, dried flowers, windows facing west, antiques, old photographs and paintings, lamplight, miscellaneous articles, complicated space. The furniture of the present: chairs and tables chosen for utility, a bowl of fruit, an open book, current periodicals, windows to the south, overhead lights, cut flowers or potted plants, modern art, mirrors. The furniture of the future: bare walls, a skylight, windows facing east, much open space, a barometer, clear desk, sharpened pencils, blank pad, unopened book, unopened bottle of wine, skylights, light colors, large doorless openings to other rooms.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 6)
“In planning ahead we should remember that usable time is at best 80 to 85 percent of total time. Long unbroken periods contain more usable time than do short periods totaling the same length.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 3)
“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.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 2)
Time And The Art Of Living [Book]
Book Overview: This is a book about time–about one’s own journey through it and, more important, about enlarging the pleasure one takes in that journey. It’s about memory of the past, hope and fear for the future, and how they color, for better and for worse, one’s experience of the present. Ultimately, it’s a book about freedom–freedom from despair of the clock, of the aging body, of the seeming waste of one’s daily routine, the freedom that comes with acceptance and appreciation of the human dimensions of time and of the place of each passing moment on life’s bounteous continuum. For Robert Grudin, living is an art, and cultivating a creative partnership with time is one of the keys to mastering it. In a series of wise, witty, and playful meditations, he suggests that happiness lies not in the effort to conquer time but rather in learning “to bend to its curve,” in hearing its music and learning to dance to it. Grudin offers practical advice and mental exercises designed to help the reader use time more effectively, but this is no ordinary self-help book. It is instead a kind of wisdom literature, a guide to life, a feast for the mind and for the spirit.