Sundial Quotes

Hide not your talents, they for use were made, What's a sundial in the shade?

A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.

We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.

When shall we live if not now?

She looked as if she were a vampire about to check the time—with a sundial.

Like the sundial, my paint box counts no hours but sunny ones.

The sight of one's own heart is degrading; people are not meant to look inward--that's why they've been give bodies, to hide their souls.

I wish you wouldn't have given the sundial bracelet to Terease" "Why?" I question and press my head onto his chest, pushing my arms back into his open jacket and around his back. "If I had it to lead me to my deepest desire, I know it would always be a direct path to you.

She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.

I'm very damn wet!' he said aloud to the sundial.

Kids are mirrors, reflecting back everything that happens to them. You’ve got to make sure they’re surrounded by good things.

The Gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish the hours---confound him, too Who in this place set up a sundial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small pieces ! . . . I can't (even sit down to eat) unless the sun gives leave. The town's so full of these confounded dials . . .

July is a blind date with summer.

It is a longing so intense that it creates what it desires, it cannot endure any touch of correction; it is, as I say, unspeakable.

I’ve dreamed of you so much you’re losing your reality. Is there still time to reach that living body and kiss onto that mouth the birth of the voice so dear to me? I’ve dreamed of you so much that my arms, accustomed to being crossed on my breast while hugging your shadow would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body. And, faced with the real appearance of what has haunted and ruled me for days and years, I would probably become a shadow. o sentimental balances. I’ve dreamed of you so much it’s no longer right for me to awaken. I sleep standing up, my body exposed to all signs of life and love, and you the only one who matters to me now, I’d be less able to touch your face and your lips than the face and the lips of the first woman who came along. I’ve dreamed of you so much, walked so much, spoken and lain with your phantom that perhaps nothing more is left me than to be a phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that walks and will joyfully walk on the sundial of your life.

She kept talking and she kept talking. I thought she would never stop. Standing there, I felt the sun pour through the windows, setting and rising on my back. The sunroom had become a sundial measuring the geological age of my psychological toture.

I assume then, that you have no real faith in the fondness any of the rest of us may feel for you?' 'None,' said Mrs. Halloran.

Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass shatter, when darkness withholds the shadow from the sundial, when the mainspring winds down so far that the clock hands hold still as death, time itself keeps on. The most we can hope a watch to do is mark that progress. And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don't really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they're able.

I don't know what it's like for other people, but love and nausea are often indistinguishable to me

It is unholy because it is heretic. It is foul. It is abominable to need something so badly that you cannot picture living without it. It is a contradiction to the condition of mankind.

Where did he go, your father?' 'Africa.' 'What for?' 'To shoot lions, of course.' 'What on Earth for?' said Mrs. Willow blankly. 'Some people shoot lions,' the girl said pleasantly, 'and some people do not shoot lions. My father is one of the people who do.

It’s possible to feel the horror of something and to accept it all at the same time. How else could we cope with being alive?

I think I would do OK in prison, because I like small enclosed spaces and being alone.

There is something eternally satisfying about lying motionless for hours on end, watching the world move around us like the shadow on a sundial.

The past always has its hands around your neck, doesn't it?

Something must be done, however. I will not have space ships landing on my lawn.

The Sun-Dial at Wells College The shadow by my finger cast Divides the future from the past: Before it, sleeps the unborn hour In darkness, and beyond thy power: Behind its unreturning line, The vanished hour, no longer thine: One hour alone is in thy hands,-- The NOW on which the shadow stands.

And the roses—the roses! Rising out of the grass, tangled round the sun-dial, wreathing the tree trunks and hanging from their branches, climbing up the walls and spreading over them with long garlands falling in cascades—they came alive day by day, hour by hour. Fair fresh leaves, and buds—and buds—tiny at first but swelling and working Magic until they burst and uncurled into cups of scent delicately spilling themselves over their brims and filling the garden air.

When people say something is “unthinkable,” what they usually mean is that they don’t want to think it. They are resistant to an idea. But that is not what unthinkable means. I understand that, now. It means to be confronted with a thought so vast, dark, and monstrous that it will not fit into any known shapes in your mind. It is poison and madness flowering behind your eyes.

The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens - finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.

Now, she thought; I may go mad, but at least I look like a lady.

Every so many years, he went to England to visit—judging by the photographs he showed us—a sundial and some oak trees.

autumn The cheerful sundial; it falls in the shadow of thy leaves. there where your branches brace themselves against the gate of heaven

Many of us are sundials in the shade. Things aren’t working, but we are not broken. We are just in the wrong spot. We need to move out of the shade and into the sun, or we need to start chopping down trees.

On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit has tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travelers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruits means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings. So at dusk you leave the place you love, not knowing if you can ever return, knowing you can never return by the same way as this. It may be, some other day, that you will open the gate by chance, and find yourself again on the other side of the wall.

The question of belief is a curious one, partaking of the wonders of childhood and the blind hopefulness of the very old; in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something. It might be suggested, and not easily disproven that anything, no matter how exotic, can be believed by someone. On the other hand, abstract belief is largely impossible; it is the concrete, the actuality of the cup, the candle, the sacrificial stone, which hardens belief; the statue is nothing until it cries, the philosophy is nothing until the philosopher is martyred.

I have no way of knowing what we may be called upon to do for ourselves.

Did you marry me for my father's money?' 'Well, that, and the house.

The sight of one's own heart is degrading; people are not meant to look inward -- that's why they've been given bodies, to hide their souls.

You are the sun, I am the sun-dial. Unless you shine on me all time stands still.

Only human beings and rabid animals turn on their own kind,

Mother’s estate—our estate—a thousand acres centered in a million more. Lawns the size of small prairies with grass so perfect it beckoned a body to lie on it, to nap on its soft perfection. Noble shade trees making sundials of the Earth, their shadows circling in stately procession; now mingling, now contracting to midday, finally stretching eastward with the dying of the day. Royal oak. Giant elms. Cottonwood and cypress and redwood and bonsai. Banyan trees lowering new trunks like smooth-sided columns in a temple roofed by sky. Willows lining carefully laid canals and haphazard streams, their hanging branches singing ancient dirges to the wind.

I took a stroll in the curious old-world garden which flanked the house. Rows of very ancient yew trees cut into strange designs girded it round. Inside was a beautiful stretch of lawn with an old sundial in the middle, the whole effect so soothing and restful that it was welcome to my somewhat jangled nerves.

You can tell the archaeologists, of course, by their photos. The tourists’ photos feature people in front of mountains, terraces, stone structures, sundials. The archaeologists wait until the people move away to take theirs: they want the terrace, the stone wall, the lintel, the human-made thing, all sans humans.

This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens— the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.

Clocks are everywhere if you know how to recognize them. A dandelion is a clock, obviously. Rice pouring into a bowl is a clock, each grain marking the passage of time. A school assignment, an apple as it withers, a tree waiting for spring. Each of these things measures living moments, what remains before death. Tick, tock.

The more haste, the less speed,

She is hysterical,” said Mrs. Halloran. “Slap her quite firmly in the face.

You can only do three things with danger: run away from it, fight it, or make friends with it. I don’t know which one to do.

[...] A man in Texas won a divorce from his wife because she tore out the last chapter of every mystery story he borrowed from the library. [...]

The experiment with humanity is at an end," Aunt Fanny said. "Splendid," Mrs. Halloran said, "I was getting very tired of all of them.

Autumn The cheerful sundial it falls in the shadow of thy leaves there where your branches brace themselves against the gate of heaven

In the middle of the porch was a vertical sun-dial, whose gnomon swayed loosely about when the wind blew, and cast its shadow hither and thither, as much as to say, ‘Here’s your fine model dial; here’s any time for any man; I am an old dial; and shiftiness is the best policy.

Well I am here, I am at the heart, I have come through the maze--where is the secret I am to learn from my many agonies? Here I am, here I am, where is my reward? What have I earned, learned, spurned?

Picnic, Lightning It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Safes drop from rooftops and flatten the odd pedestrian mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body’s rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore. This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens— the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.

The longest day of sunlight...comes at the beginning of Summer rather than in its midst. In consequence, all Summer long we are inclining towards Summer's end instead of building to a climax and then tapering off.

THREE DAYS LATER A MESSAGE WAS LEFT  UNDER A PEBBLE UPON THE SUNDIAL.”   “‘If it really annoys you, Hilton, we might go and travel, you and I, and so avoid this nuisance.’ “‘What, be driven out of our own house by a practical joker?

[...] 'You, sir,' the man said, addressing Essex. 'Do you atone?' 'Daily,' said Essex. 'Sin?' 'When I can,' said Essex manfully. 'Metal?' 'I beg your pardon?' 'How do you stand on metal? Allow yourselves metal fastenings? Meat? Ills of the flesh?' 'I am heir to all of them,' said Essex, inspired. [...]

Okay, fuck the sundial. We'll just go straight and eventually we'll get there. What I mean is that we'll get somewhere. Out of here. I mean, logically, we have to get out as long as we walk straight. I've done this millions of times. Whenever everything's killing me, I just say to myself, screw it, and go straight ahead.

A man in Texas won a divorce from his wife because she tore out the last chapter of every mystery story he borrowed from the library.

I dread that it may be only a longing for annihilation. No person who has seen his own face plain can want to live longer.

These days I don’t understand why anyone bothers to watch soap operas or go to movies. I don’t even read or watch the news. Living is enough. It is so intense and painful.

We love them—or, need them. Those two can get mixed up.

Memory is a noose around the neck. Sometimes it tightens on me so strongly that I can't breathe. It's hard to tell what will wake it.

I don't even read or watch the news. Living is enough. It is so intense and painful.

With warning hand I mark time's rapid flight From life's glad morning to its solemn night Yet through God's love, I also show There's light above me by the shade below.

Because of what I loved at 7, I still get jobs in my 60's. Guess who got the job? Crazy Ray. Ray Bradbury

Remember, this--this is the end we have waited for so long.

Moms are like the desert, too. Sometimes you can’t stop them.

Essex made a face. 'Ambrosia is not my drink.

Some inner integrity had preserved their shop from being a shoppe.

Only human beings and rabid animals turn on their own kind; gratuitous pain is unknown in nature.

You all want the whole world to be changed so you will be different. But I don't suppose people get changed any by just a new world. And anyway that world isn't any more real than this one.

Mrs. Halloran believed she had gone mad, but Aunt Fanny mad was so much more palatable than Aunt Fanny sand that Mrs. Halloran bit her tongue, averted her eyes, and winced only occasionally.

Mrs. Halloran believed she had gone mad, but Aunt Fanny mad was so much more palatable than Aunt Fanny sane that Mrs. Halloran bit her tongue, averted her eyes, and winced only occasionally.

And the time sundials tell May be minutes and hours. But it may just as well Be seconds and sparkles, or seasons and flowers. No, I don't think of time as just minutes and hours. Time can be heartbeats, or bird songs, or miles, Or waves on a beach, or ants in their files (They do move like seconds—just watch their feet go: Tick-tick-tick, like a clock). You'll learn as you grow That whatever there is in a garden, the sun Counts up on its dial. By the time it is done Our sundial—or someone's— will certainly add All the good things there are. Yes, and all of the bad. And if anyone's here for the finish, the sun Will have told him—by sundial—how well we have done. How well we have done, or how badly. Alas, That is a long thought. Let me hope we all pass.

And there were birds singing, and--oh, I wish I could remember, and make you all see how lovely it was!--and flowers, and everything was so gentle and warm and light; it is going to be so beautiful

I think of that sundial on the tower at Delafosse: the long shadow cast by a shape unseen, relentlessly circling the dial. In time the iron rod will rust, and the brass-bound face will crumble. Time devours all things: love and murder and secrets. And though the sun sinks, and the golden numerals fade, we must believe that our own fragile hearts will guide us, like pinpricks of starlight through the approaching night.

I know this much—the world out there, Fancy, that world which is all around on the other side of the wall, it isn’t real. It’s real inside here, we’re real, but what is outside is like it’s made of cardboard, or plastic, or something. Nothing out there is real. Everything is made out of something else, and everything is made to look like something else, and it all comes apart in your hands. The people aren’t real, they’re nothing but endless copies of each other, all looking just alike, like paper dolls, and they live in houses full of artificial things and eat imitation food—” “My doll house,” Fancy said, amused. “Your dolls have little cakes and roasts made of wood and painted. Well, the people out there have cakes and bread and cookies made out of pretend flour, with all kinds of things taken out of it to make it prettier for them to eat, and all kinds of things put in to make it easier for them to eat, and they eat meat which has been cooked for them already so they won’t have to bother to do anything except heat it up and they read newspapers full of nonsense and lies and one day they hear that some truth is being kept from them for their own good and the next day they hear that the truth is being kept from them because it was really a lie

[...] 'He is the captain,' Miss Ogilvie explained eagerly. 'He is coming home with us, Aunt Fanny invited him.' 'Captain?' said Julia, who was not at all that bright, 'captain of what?' 'I wish I knew,' said the captain.

There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere, as the grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother's room, to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and think within myself, 'Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it can tell the time again?

She forced herself to sit up primly on the edge of the marble bench, repressing firmly the nausea she felt at its warm pressure, and she smoothed the black linen of her dress across her lap, and tucked in her hair, which had somehow come loose, and crossed her ankles decently, and took her black-edged handkerchief from her bosom and dried her eyes and wiped away the dampness and grime from her face. Now, she thought; I may go mad, but at least I look like a lady.

The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walls and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.

Sirius Sojourn by Stewart Stafford Cottage in an aromatic meadow, Summer's languid haze hanging, The old windmill's sundial stilled, Chirping birds and insect drones. Flowing brooks at a funereal pace, A bloated lull duels exiguous energy, Thick air's blanketing somnolence, Liquid refreshment soothes inertia. Salmon sundown slithers to a siesta, In a clear purple sky nodding assent, The intense day imperceptibly eased, As the night's humid embrace begins. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Cambridge was run by a mixture of fogeys too old to be considered dangerous, and Puritans who had been packed into the place by Cromwell after he’d purged all the people he did consider dangerous. With a few exceptions such as Isaac Barrow, none of them would have had any use for Isaac’s sundial, because it didn’t look like an old sundial, and they’d prefer telling time wrong the Classical way to telling it right the newfangled way. The curves that Newton plotted on the wall were a methodical document of their wrongness—a manifesto like Luther’s theses on the church-door.

Maybe you'll get onto the other side of that mirror in the new clean world. Maybe you'll look through from the other side and see this world again and go around crying that you wish some big thing would happen and wipe out that one and send you back here. Like I keep trying to tell you, it doesn't matter which world you're in.

As I inspected the engravings for sale, I noticed a very fine classical scene within which was written, FERREA VIRGA EST, UMBRATILIS MOTUS. Recognizing the Latin motto from the sundial at Delafosse, I asked the proprietor if he knew the meaning. "'The rod is of iron, the motion of shadow,'" he told me obligingly. "Thank you," I said with a smile , and returned to the engraving. It was a memento mori, an Italian scene in which the sundial was reminiscent of a tomb. On one side, a pair of young lovers basked idly in sunshine, while on the other they slept in sinister shadow. An ugly representation of Death approached them from behind the ornate tomb. They do not see what pursues them, I mused.

Lei, signore" disse l'uomo, rivolgendosi a Essex. "Lei fa penitenza?". "Tutti i giorni" rispose Essex. "Pecca?" "Quando posso" disse virilmente Essex. "Metallo?" "Come, scusi?" "Qual è la sua posizione sul metallo? Si concede allacciature di metallo per i vestiti? Carne? Afflizioni fisiche?". "Ho ereditato tutto questo" disse Essex, ispirato.

There was wonder in that insubstantial pointer; it gave me news that no clockwork could do. Time was not a fixed series of moments, it said, but something moving like a flower that grows, growing perhaps even like a flower; or traveling the minutes like the spokes of a shadowy wheel turning once a day, and perhaps going somewhere or somewhen, carrying me along with it

The two thought themselves alone. But all the while, one watched with the night-wide eyes of love. While they paced the pebbled paths between the silent flowers’ spiked arrays, sage Thyme spied upon each pale sigh, peeping between bloom and leaf. And while they sat side by side and hand in hand on the stained stone bench beneath the spreading wisteria, Thyme watched unwinking from the midnight face of the mute sundial. And while they lay lazy on the soft grass, swearing the sweet oaths of love and longing, and whispering as they parted that though long lives might pass like a night and the New Sun sunder the centuries, yet never should they ever part, Thyme crept and cried, counting seconds that spilled with the sand from the hourglass, and scenting the soft breezes that cooled the child’s burning cheek with his sad spice. The

On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit had tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travellers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruit means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings. So at dusk you say goodbye to the place you love, not knowing if you can ever return, knowing you can never return by the same way as this. It may be, some other day, that you will open a gate by chance, and find yourself again on the other side of the wall.

I think they want the same things you do, only you would... inherit them, so to speak, just by growing up. Things like excitement, and new experiences, and all kinds of strange and wonderful things happening; you get them anyway, just by the process of growing older, but for them... they've already outgrown all they know and they want to try it all over again. Even at my age, you keep thinking you've missed so much, and you get older all the time.

That wasn’t necessary,” Benix told Kestrel. “It was,” she said. “He’s tiresome. I don’t mind taking his money, but I cannot take his company.” “You couldn’t spare a thought for me before chasing him away? Maybe I would like a chance to win his gold.” “Lord Irex can spare it,” Ronan added. “Well, I don’t like poor losers,” said Kestrel. “That’s why I play with you two.” Benix groaned. “She’s a fiend,” Ronan agreed cheerfully. “Then why do you play with her?” “I enjoy losing to Kestrel. I will give anything she will take.” “While I live in hope to one day win,” Benix said, and gave Kestrel’s hand a friendly pat. “Yes, yes,” Kestrel said. “You are both fine flatterers. Now ante up.” “We lack a fourth player,” Benix pointed out. Bite and Sting was played in pairs or fours. Despite herself, Kestrel looked at Arin standing not too far away, considering the garden or the house beyond it. From his position he would have had a view of Irex’s tiles, and Ronan’s. He would not, however, have been able to see hers. She wondered what he had made of the game--if he had bothered to follow it. Perhaps feeling her gaze on him, Arin glanced her way. His eyes were calm, uninterested. She could read nothing in them. “I suppose our game is over then,” she told the two lords in a bright voice. “Shall we join the others?” Ronan poured the gold into her purse and slipped its velvet strap over her wrist, unnecessarily fiddling with the broad ribbon until it lay flat against Kestrel’s skin without a winkle. He offered his arm and she took it, resting her palm on the cool silk of his sleeve. Benix fell in step, and the three walked toward the heart of the murmuring party. Kestrel knew, rather than saw, that Arin shifted position and followed, like the shadow line of a sundial. This was precisely what he was supposed to do as her attendant at Lady Faris’s picnic, yet she had the uncomfortable impression of being tracked.

At Columbia, Obama wrote an article in a student weekly, Sundial, calling for an end to the U.S. military industrial complex. Obama’s article was a response to the so-called nuclear freeze movement that was sweeping American campuses at the time. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth in the early 1980s, I remember well the paranoia of the freeze activists, who seemed convinced that the world was about to end unless their nuclear freeze solution was immediately implemented. Calling as it did for a reciprocal freeze in U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals, the freeze was a liberal cause, but apparently not liberal enough for Obama. For him the issue came down to the big, bad military industrial complex and its irrational, insatiable desire for more costly weapons. “Generally the narrow focus of the freeze movement as well as academic discussions of first versus second strike capabilities suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets.”21

The candy-colored pavillions and exhibit halls, fitted out with Saturn rings, lightning bolts, shark's fins, golden grilles and honeycombs, the Italian pavillion with its entire facade dissolving in a perpetual cascade of water, the gigantic cash register, the austere and sinuous temples of the Detroit gods, the fountains, the pylons and sundials, the statues of George Washington and Freedom of Speech and Truth Showing the Way to Freedom had been peeled, stripped, prized apart, knocked down, bulldozed into piles, loaded onto truck beds, dumped into barges, towed out past the mouth of the harbor, and sent to the bottom of the sea. It made him sad, not because he saw some instructive allegory or harsh sermon on the vanity of all human hopes and Utopian imaginings in this translation of a bright summer dream into an immense mud puddle freezing over at the end of a September afternoon - he was too young to have such inklings - but because he had so loved the Fair, and seeing it this way, he felt in his heart what he had known all along, that, like childhood, the Fair was over, and he would never be able to visit again.

Of the question of the sex-instinct I know very little and I do not think that it counts for very much in a really great passion. It can be aroused by such nothings—by an untied shoelace, by a glance of the eye in passing—that I think it might be left out of the calculation. I don't mean to say that any great passion can exist without a desire for consummation. That seems to me to be a commonplace and to be therefore a matter needing no comment at all. It is a thing, with all its accidents, that must be taken for granted, as, in a novel, or a biography, you take it for granted that the characters have their meals with some regularity. But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.

(about Pilgrims) It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and 13 pairs of boots. Yet, between them they failed to bring a single cow or horse or plough or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower's manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper and a hatter- occupations whose importance is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment. Their military commander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as "Captain Shrimpe" hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives from whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those who labelled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterwards, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it. They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigours ahead, and they demonstrated their manifest incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toe-hold into a self-sustaining colony.

Eastern Standard Time Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address only those in my own time zone, this proper slice of longitude that runs from pole to snowy pole down the globe through Montreal to Bogota. Oh, fellow inhabitants of this singular band, sitting up in your many beds this morning— the sun falling through the windows and casting a shadow on the sundial— consider those in other zones who cannot hear these words. They are not slipping into a bathrobe as we are, or following the smell of coffee in a timely fashion. Rather, they are at work already, leaning on copy machines, hammering nails into a house-frame. They are not swallowing a vitamin like us; rather they are smoking a cigarette under a half moon, even jumping around on a dance floor, or just now sliding under the covers, pulling down the little chains on their bed lamps. But we are not like these others, for at this very moment on the face of the earth, we are standing under a hot shower, or we are eating our breakfast, considered by people of all zones to be the most important meal of the day. Later, when the time is right, we might sit down with the boss, wash the car, or linger at a candle-lit table, but now is the hour for pouring the juice and flipping the eggs with one eye on the toaster. So let us slice a banana and uncap the jam, lift our brimming spoons of milk, and leave it to the others to lower a flag or spin absurdly in a barber's chair— those antipodal oddballs, always early or late. Let us praise Sir Stanford Fleming the Canadian genius who first scored with these lines the length of the spinning earth. Let us move together through the rest of this day passing in unison from light to shadow, coasting over the crest of noon into the valley of the evening and then, holding hands, slip into the deeper valley of night.

I continued my explorations in a cobbled yard overlooked by broken doors and cracked windows. Pushing open a swollen door into a storeroom, I found a stream running across paving stones and a carpet of slippery green moss. My explorations took me beneath a gateway surmounted by a clock face, standing with hands fixed permanently at eleven o'clock. Beyond stood derelict stables; then the park opened up in an undulating vista, reaching all the way to a swathe of deep forest on the horizon. In the distance was the twinkle of the river that I realized must border my own land at Whitelow. The grass was knee-high and speckled with late buttercups, but I was transported by that first sight of the Delafosse estate. In its situation alone, the Croxons had chosen our new home well. I dreamed for a moment of myself and Michael making a great fortune, and no longer renting Delafosse Hall but owning every inch of it, my inheritance spinning gold from cotton. Turning back to view the Hall I took a sharp breath; it was as massive and ancient as a child's dream of a castle, the bulk of its walls carpeted in greenery, the diamond-leaded windows sparkling in picturesque stone mullions. True, the barley-twist chimneys leaned askew, and the roofs sagged beneath the weight of years, but the shell of it was magnificent. It cast a strange possessive mood upon me. I remembered Michael's irritation at the house the previous night, and his eagerness to leave. Somehow I had to entice Michael into this shared dream of a happy life here, beside me. Determined to explore the park, I followed the nearest path. After walking through a deep wood for a good while I emerged into the sunlight by a round hill surmounted by a two-story tower. A hunting lodge, Mrs. Croxon had called it, but I thought it more a folly. It had a fantastical quality, with four miniature turrets, each topped with a verdigris-tarnished dome. Above the doorway stood a sundial drawn upon a disc representing a blazing sun. It was embellished with a script I thought might be Latin: FERREA VIRGA EST, UMBRATILIS MOTUS. I wondered whether Michael might know the meaning, or Anne's husband perhaps. As for the sundial's accuracy, the morning light was too weak to cast a line of shadow.

Reality,' Essex said. 'Reality. What is real, Aunt Fanny?' 'The Truth,' said Aunt Fanny at once. 'Mrs. Willow, what is real?' 'Comfort, ' said Mrs. Willow. 'Miss Ogilvie, what is real?' 'Oh, dear.' Miss Ogilvie looked for help to Mrs. Willow, to Julia. 'I couldn't really say, not having had that much experience. Well... food, I guess.' 'Maryjane,' said Essex, 'what is reality?' 'What?' Maryjane stared with her mouth open. 'You mean, something real, like something not in the movies?' 'A dream world,' Arabella supplied. Julia laughed. 'Essex,' she said, 'what is real?' Essex bowed to her gravely. 'I am real,' he said. 'I am not at all sure about the rest of you.' [...] 'Well, reality,' Mrs. Willow said finally, 'all it means is money. A roof over your head, of course, and a little something three times a day and maybe a drop to drink. But mostly money. Clothes. Looking nice, and feeling a little chipper, and of course,' she added, giving Essex a wink -- and provoking Arabella into saying 'Mother, dear!' -- 'a man in your bed. Reality!' and now it sounded as though Mrs. Willow might be saying 'May wine,' or even possibly 'tropical moonlight,' and she gave a happy little sigh.