I love this letter to the writer idea, it's genius! I hope you will do more, Jeffrey.
Time is a funny concept - I think we all have a slightly different view of it, some shrinking from it, some embracing it. Whenever I visit cemeteries (some of my favorite places) it's always thrilling to find the oldest tomb stone, which is just a fancy way of proclaiming "Wow! You've been dead a really long time!" My favorite, though, is imagining our present age as it will appear in the distant future... 👻
Thanks for the encouragement, Troy! I also enjoy imagining in our present age in the distant future, though I fear the current era won’t exactly look like a golden age…
Jeffrey, I have a strong suspicion Mr Hazlitt would have sat quite willingly with you for many an hour discussing, not only this vast question (illusion) of time but many, if not all of his other other essay subjects too. How clever of you to bring to the now the very theme he wrote of too... I thoroughly enjoyed this, thank you.
This whole meditation provoked a very particular memory, an impression of time and relative pastness that confounded me when I experienced it and has never left me. Sometime in the mid-2000s I was in Nashville, Tennessee for a conference. I used the opportunity to visit the Hermitage, the homestead of Andrew Jackson, dead since 1845. For some reason at the time -- I don't recall what -- at his gravesite was then displayed a photo of then President Theodore Roosevelt, about a century before my time, visiting the grave and standing more or less where I was now standing, looking over the grave that was then, say, for Roosevelt, 60 years old. I had never, to my knowledge, seen such a distinct photograph of the past looking on at the deeper past, containing one subject's visible consideration of what was past to him. I won't say more. I think you get the idea.
Thanks, Jay. That memory of yours comes over very powerfully. These layers of time seen through the eyes of others can be disorienting. And now, added to Jackson and Roosevelt, we can contemplate you looking back at their time.
Interesting you should end on that note, Jeffrey. A motif of me looking on, contemplating the observed and conjured past, is one I've sometimes incorporated into my writing, including in cemeteries, as has come up in these comments. My meditation "The Cemeteries at Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse" ends on "a cold stone bench, the hand that writes /
the blown leaf, the millipede / the shadows of them all."
Jeffrey, you’ve proven that it is indeed possible to write with vigor, specificity and reflective insight about writing the reader probably has not read. Quite a feat, one I have considered and lacked the courage to try. This piece conveys the sense of two fine literary minds in glowing conversation.
Rona, that's such a lovely thing to say - thank you! This, as you have detected, was a bit of an experiment for me. But I was drawn to certain overlaps of experience between myself and this writer who lived 200 years ago. And I think it's no coincidence that Hazlitt's essay was published under the heading “Table Talk” in the London Magazine of 1821. Hazlitt probably tended towards monologue, but his piece invites a response.
Thank you, Jeffrey. Time is always on my mind whenever I think about Tokyo, its past (perhaps, in my mind, mythologized) beauty, and the way it's changing for the worse.
This is one of the reasons why I enjoy reading historical fiction and nonfiction, to bring to life and remember that: "The sun shone in Julius Cæsar’s time just as it does now."
But of course, as Hazlitt points out, history is horribly subjective, "Impressions of a peculiar and accidental nature, of which few traces are left, and which return seldom or never, fade in the distance, and are consigned to obscurity,—while those that belong to a given and definite class are kept up, and assume a constant and tangible form, from familiarity and habit."
As we like to say in our household, which you both eluded to, "time is an illusion'. ⌛Thanks Jeffrey for another fine essay!
Thank you, Lani! I’m tempted to say we make ourselves slaves to time. But perhaps what we are shackled to is the human exploitation of chronological time, in the service of power and money.
Yes, we seem to have an illusion that all societies age congruently while most of human history was one of cultural isolation with little cross-pollination of ideas and technologies. Even today with modern transportation and communication there is a great disparity of knowledge and wealth. The Stonehenge culture and the Egyptian Great Pyramid cultures may have shared the same chronology but they didn't even know of each other's existence.
Perhaps it is comforting to imagine that evolution and progress happen in logical and synchronic steps, but in fact, it was more of a random and often violent genocidal collision of ideas and cultures often on wildly different trajectories.
I recently visited the Native American Navaho, Hopi, and Apache nations in Arizona. The struggle between the stubborn Stone Age cultures and the prevailing Iron Age, now Electronic Age culture still echoes through the centuries. To cross into the Indian Nations is to experience a time warp separating cultures living in different concepts of time simultaneously. My Apache son-in-law will die fiercely opposing assimulation into modern American culture. What I consider a curious antique, he experiences as his present moment.
No, we are not all "contemporary world citizens" but a cacophony of cultures and eras existing simultaneously. There is a modern hubris of imagining everyone is like ourselves which ironically creates more misunderstandings than unifications. Vive la différence...
“A cacophony of cultures and eras existing simultaneously” sums it up, well, John. I've spent some time in the Andes and come across the notion there of our being with our backs to the future, facing the past; those two English words may be expressed by one in Quechua. There doesn't seem to be a lot of literature on that, but it would fit this discussion well.
Thank you for your essay and chef’s kiss for “my notions of time and history seemed to shift like tectonic plates”.
I had such a moment in the town gardens of Bury St Edmunds, which are the ancient abbey grounds and contain the ruins of the medieval abbey scattered around the current abbey, which was restored and given a spire in 2005. Many historical tourist towns exist as soap bubbles, fragile and a little magical that they exist at all. They offer us the illusion of time miraculously preserved. By contrast, Bury —like much of Easy Anglia— persists. It carries its antiquity lightly, and offers a sense of continuity. The townspeople use and love their gardens, they feel affection for their monuments but seemingly without worshipping them. Can you feel a reverse vertigo? Rather than being carried away by time, I felt planted within it, part of it. Something remains, something it carried forward. And we all matter, each in our own way.
Thank you for such a thoughtful reflection on this topic, Michelle! I love your notion of East Anglia persisting and carrying its antiquity lightly. That chimes with my memory of a year spent in Norwich. The cathedral is one of my favourite buildings anywhere.
Thank you, Elizabeth! I can almost hear him growling, but whether with grudging pleasure or disdain, I can't tell. 😊 (And he'd probably have hated emojis.)
“At that moment my notions of time and history seemed to shift like tectonic plates.” An extraordinary conclusion to a richly layered paragraph. Such a wonderful essay. As always, you weave your thoughts and personal experience into your knowledge of history, literature, culture, and now geology. I haven’t read Hazlitt, but you bring him to life both as an admired scholar and a friend. Thank you, Jeffrey.
Thank you, Mary! I'm lucky to have a reader as generous and attentive as you! I wonder what it would have been like to wander with Hazlitt through ancient ruins… Though he had a habit of falling out with people so perhaps such a walk would not have ended well.
Hi, that painting of Stonehenge by Constable is interesting. Is it me, or does it look different now? Has someone straightened some of the stones or did Constable paint from a faulty memory?
I love the idea of you ‘commenting’ on this old essay. And I love how you transfused your own thoughts about time with that if Williams.
This was great :)
Thank you, Michael! It was a bit of an experiment and I'm glad it worked for you.
It worked great :)
This was a very inspiring read, thank you.
That’s very kind of you, Gary. It's such an encouragement to think that the essay has been read with enjoyment.
Thank you for this gift!
Thank you for reading, Anne!
I love this letter to the writer idea, it's genius! I hope you will do more, Jeffrey.
Time is a funny concept - I think we all have a slightly different view of it, some shrinking from it, some embracing it. Whenever I visit cemeteries (some of my favorite places) it's always thrilling to find the oldest tomb stone, which is just a fancy way of proclaiming "Wow! You've been dead a really long time!" My favorite, though, is imagining our present age as it will appear in the distant future... 👻
Thanks for the encouragement, Troy! I also enjoy imagining in our present age in the distant future, though I fear the current era won’t exactly look like a golden age…
Jeffrey, I have a strong suspicion Mr Hazlitt would have sat quite willingly with you for many an hour discussing, not only this vast question (illusion) of time but many, if not all of his other other essay subjects too. How clever of you to bring to the now the very theme he wrote of too... I thoroughly enjoyed this, thank you.
Thanks, Susie! I’m thrilled that you liked it. If I’d met Hazlitt, I suspect he would have done most of the talking…
This whole meditation provoked a very particular memory, an impression of time and relative pastness that confounded me when I experienced it and has never left me. Sometime in the mid-2000s I was in Nashville, Tennessee for a conference. I used the opportunity to visit the Hermitage, the homestead of Andrew Jackson, dead since 1845. For some reason at the time -- I don't recall what -- at his gravesite was then displayed a photo of then President Theodore Roosevelt, about a century before my time, visiting the grave and standing more or less where I was now standing, looking over the grave that was then, say, for Roosevelt, 60 years old. I had never, to my knowledge, seen such a distinct photograph of the past looking on at the deeper past, containing one subject's visible consideration of what was past to him. I won't say more. I think you get the idea.
Thanks, Jay. That memory of yours comes over very powerfully. These layers of time seen through the eyes of others can be disorienting. And now, added to Jackson and Roosevelt, we can contemplate you looking back at their time.
Interesting you should end on that note, Jeffrey. A motif of me looking on, contemplating the observed and conjured past, is one I've sometimes incorporated into my writing, including in cemeteries, as has come up in these comments. My meditation "The Cemeteries at Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse" ends on "a cold stone bench, the hand that writes /
the blown leaf, the millipede / the shadows of them all."
Jeffrey, you’ve proven that it is indeed possible to write with vigor, specificity and reflective insight about writing the reader probably has not read. Quite a feat, one I have considered and lacked the courage to try. This piece conveys the sense of two fine literary minds in glowing conversation.
Rona, that's such a lovely thing to say - thank you! This, as you have detected, was a bit of an experiment for me. But I was drawn to certain overlaps of experience between myself and this writer who lived 200 years ago. And I think it's no coincidence that Hazlitt's essay was published under the heading “Table Talk” in the London Magazine of 1821. Hazlitt probably tended towards monologue, but his piece invites a response.
Oh, and you absolutely should send this to TLM to see if they would publish it!
😊🙏
Gosh, I loved this, it was just so beautifully done and a really sublime meditation on time past and passing.
Thank you, June! I'm so pleased that you liked this!
Thank you, Jeffrey. Time is always on my mind whenever I think about Tokyo, its past (perhaps, in my mind, mythologized) beauty, and the way it's changing for the worse.
I guess I've had similar thoughts about other places. Though generally I don't stay anywhere long enough to sense decline!
But I'm also aware of the words of the 15th century Castilian poet, Jorge Manrique:
“a nuestro parecer
cualquiera tiempo pasado
fue mejor.”
.
This is one of the reasons why I enjoy reading historical fiction and nonfiction, to bring to life and remember that: "The sun shone in Julius Cæsar’s time just as it does now."
But of course, as Hazlitt points out, history is horribly subjective, "Impressions of a peculiar and accidental nature, of which few traces are left, and which return seldom or never, fade in the distance, and are consigned to obscurity,—while those that belong to a given and definite class are kept up, and assume a constant and tangible form, from familiarity and habit."
As we like to say in our household, which you both eluded to, "time is an illusion'. ⌛Thanks Jeffrey for another fine essay!
Thank you, Lani! I’m tempted to say we make ourselves slaves to time. But perhaps what we are shackled to is the human exploitation of chronological time, in the service of power and money.
Well said.
Yes, we seem to have an illusion that all societies age congruently while most of human history was one of cultural isolation with little cross-pollination of ideas and technologies. Even today with modern transportation and communication there is a great disparity of knowledge and wealth. The Stonehenge culture and the Egyptian Great Pyramid cultures may have shared the same chronology but they didn't even know of each other's existence.
Perhaps it is comforting to imagine that evolution and progress happen in logical and synchronic steps, but in fact, it was more of a random and often violent genocidal collision of ideas and cultures often on wildly different trajectories.
I recently visited the Native American Navaho, Hopi, and Apache nations in Arizona. The struggle between the stubborn Stone Age cultures and the prevailing Iron Age, now Electronic Age culture still echoes through the centuries. To cross into the Indian Nations is to experience a time warp separating cultures living in different concepts of time simultaneously. My Apache son-in-law will die fiercely opposing assimulation into modern American culture. What I consider a curious antique, he experiences as his present moment.
No, we are not all "contemporary world citizens" but a cacophony of cultures and eras existing simultaneously. There is a modern hubris of imagining everyone is like ourselves which ironically creates more misunderstandings than unifications. Vive la différence...
“A cacophony of cultures and eras existing simultaneously” sums it up, well, John. I've spent some time in the Andes and come across the notion there of our being with our backs to the future, facing the past; those two English words may be expressed by one in Quechua. There doesn't seem to be a lot of literature on that, but it would fit this discussion well.
Thank you for your essay and chef’s kiss for “my notions of time and history seemed to shift like tectonic plates”.
I had such a moment in the town gardens of Bury St Edmunds, which are the ancient abbey grounds and contain the ruins of the medieval abbey scattered around the current abbey, which was restored and given a spire in 2005. Many historical tourist towns exist as soap bubbles, fragile and a little magical that they exist at all. They offer us the illusion of time miraculously preserved. By contrast, Bury —like much of Easy Anglia— persists. It carries its antiquity lightly, and offers a sense of continuity. The townspeople use and love their gardens, they feel affection for their monuments but seemingly without worshipping them. Can you feel a reverse vertigo? Rather than being carried away by time, I felt planted within it, part of it. Something remains, something it carried forward. And we all matter, each in our own way.
Thank you for such a thoughtful reflection on this topic, Michelle! I love your notion of East Anglia persisting and carrying its antiquity lightly. That chimes with my memory of a year spent in Norwich. The cathedral is one of my favourite buildings anywhere.
A superb essay, Jeffrey! Hazlitt would be pleased, I am sure.
Thank you, Elizabeth! I can almost hear him growling, but whether with grudging pleasure or disdain, I can't tell. 😊 (And he'd probably have hated emojis.)
Never thought I would but I quite love emojis 😉
“At that moment my notions of time and history seemed to shift like tectonic plates.” An extraordinary conclusion to a richly layered paragraph. Such a wonderful essay. As always, you weave your thoughts and personal experience into your knowledge of history, literature, culture, and now geology. I haven’t read Hazlitt, but you bring him to life both as an admired scholar and a friend. Thank you, Jeffrey.
Thank you, Mary! I'm lucky to have a reader as generous and attentive as you! I wonder what it would have been like to wander with Hazlitt through ancient ruins… Though he had a habit of falling out with people so perhaps such a walk would not have ended well.
Hi, that painting of Stonehenge by Constable is interesting. Is it me, or does it look different now? Has someone straightened some of the stones or did Constable paint from a faulty memory?
In other news, there's a new photography exhibition at Stonehenge about stone circles: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/feb/14/a-space-for-solace-stonehenge-show-explores-attraction-of-stone-circles
Yes, there has been some restoration of Stonehenge: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/blog-posts/excavation-restoration-stonehenge-1950s-60s/
Aha! Thanks
Thank you for that, Holly!