time

A friend of mine (who truly functions in a completely unique frame of time) recommended this book to me years ago. Every once in awhile I open up the pages and remember my own relationship with time.

Robert Grudin writes in his book, "Time and the Art of Living"

Preface
Time is everywhere, yet eludes us. Time is so bound up in our universe and ourselves that it resists our efforts to isolate and define it. Time haunts our experience like some invisible spirit of things, some irretrievable truth. And when we try to manage our own time, setting new goals, cleaning and rearranging the little houses of our days, time gently mocks us - not so much because we lack wit as because time operates on a deeper psychological level than conscious effort can normally reach.

page 135
x.3 Anthony Trollope wrote every morning before going off to work for the postal service. His attitude toward his art was placid and workmanlike: he set himself weekly quotas in pages, and if he happened to complete a book during the course of a morning's work, he would simply begin another. His contemporary Gustave Flaubert would sit each day for hours, fuming, fretting and scribbling words and phrases, until the proper rhythms and tonalities broke surface in his mind. Then , for a relatively short period, he would write fluently and intensely. Trollope and Flaubert had little in common except that, like all successful artists, they viewed time heroically and made themselves lavish gifts of it....To sit down at your desk in the morning and know that you are taking up the work of a thousand mornings, to write knowing that tomorrow's work can redeem any imperfection in today's - these realizations produce cheer and confidence in and of themselves. Similarly, when we allow ourselves not just one or two hours, but several for productive activity, we show patience and mercy to our own minds, and they bring forth good things even on bad days.

x.4 Laughable error and profoudn discovery are born of the same freedom.