Tick Tock Tick Tock

On April 8th last year I wrote this post: Does London need a garden bridge?

Yet by August 14th the new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, had called time on the project.

London garden bridge project collapses in acrimony after £37m spent

This leads me onto some good passing-of-time quotes which are nicely thoughtful for a Sunday morning.

I’m terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I ‘do’ anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on ‘time’s – it doesn’t of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn’t matter if you’ve done anything or not. (Philip Larkin in Letter to Monica)

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. (Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending)

People parted, years passed, they met again- and the meeting proved no reunion, offered no warm memories, only the acid knowledge that time had passed and things weren’t as bright or attractive as they had been. (Jacqueline Susann in Valley of the Dolls)

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are? (Ian McEwan in The Child in Time)

I’ve read all the books that these quotes are taken from (via Goodreads Quotes) but although I don’t recall the particular words I do remember that each title was a stunningly good read. I was a teenager when I read Valley of the Dolls so I don’t know if it would stack up as such a good read today. However, as Valley of the Dolls has sold 31 million copies worldwide and is one of the best-selling book in publishing history it must still have a lot going for it.

I’ve never read David Copperfield but I love the imagery in this quote.

The rooks were sailing about the cathedral towers; and the towers themselves, overlooking many a long unaltered mile of the rich country and its pleasant streams, were cutting the bright morning air as if there were no such thing as change on earth. Yet the bells, when they sounded told me sorrowfully of change in everything; told me of their own age, and my pretty Dora’s youth; and of the many, never old, who had lived and loved and died, while the reverberations of the bells had hummed through the rusty armour of the Black Prince hanging up within, and, motes upon the deep of Time, had lost themselves in air, as circles do in water. (Charles Dickens in David Copperfield)

Thanks for reading my blog today.

Hope you’re having an enjoyable weekend.