"The Passage of Time"

The photograph is of Salvador Dali’s 1931 painting “The Persistence of Memory,” which depicts what was his sense of the fluidity and subjectivity in the nature of time. While my taste in art runs to the more conventional, especially Connecticut Impressionists and grandchildrens’ art, this is a painting I have always found fascinating.

 

It is my belief that we each find the passage of time unique to ourselves.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“The Passage of Time”

October 12 , 2025

 

“It has all gone so fast, Duke. Like a dream.

How is it the days crawl by and yet the years fly?”

                                                                                                                Lawrence Sanders (1920-1998)

                                                                                                                The Anderson Tapes, 1970

 

When asked about the phrase “the passage of time,” Chat GPT responded, it “...is the perception of the continuous, forward movement of the past through the present and into the future.” When one is happy time passes more quickly than when one is sad, yet the passage of time is real. As the second-hand ticks forward, the present becomes the past.

 

But perception of the lapse of time can differ from reality. While the years since my birth have been historically significant, I don’t think of them in an historical sense, and 1941 does not seem that far back; yet 84 years before I was born it was 1857, which does seem a long time ago. It was the year of the Mountain Meadow massacre in Utah and the year the last Mughal emperor surrendered to the British in Delhi. Franklin Pierce was still President and Lincoln would not be sworn in for another four years.

 

Yet memories consume me. In the wee small hours of the morning, when the bedroom is dark and morning seems eons away, my mind travels backward, in kaleidoscopic-like fashion, to images from long ago – walking with my maternal grandfather to “Bruin’s lair,” a place in the Connecticut woods where he told me a friendly bear lived; having my older sister dress me in her Mary Janes; missing the school bus to which I had had to walk just shy of a mile; watching my father milk the goats, and then, later, slow-walking to his studio to confess I had broken a window. Childhood memories stick with us, perhaps because, as Ian McEwan wrote in The Child in Time: “For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present.”

 

And there are other memories that collectively depict the passage of time – taking my first flight at age 13, on a DC-3, from Keene, New Hampshire to the Adirondack Airport near Saranac Lake, with a change at newly-named Laguardia Airport; my first car, a 1947 Ford coupe, and being admonished for driving it too fast; a series of flights alone across Canada from Toronto to Fort Nelson, British Columbia at age 19, and an 18-hour drive alone, the next summer, from Falconbridge, Ontario to Greenwich, CT. And, not yet 21, meeting the young lady who became my wife, introduced by my sister in a New Hampshire ski lodge. 

 

In his posthumously published poem, “Auguries of Innocence,” William Blake wrote: “To see a world in a grain of sand,/ And a Heaven in a wild flower,/ Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,/ And Eternity in an hour.” But to me the concept of infinity and the passage of time through eternity is incomprehensible. Yet, I detect an answer, in the uncountable ancestors who came before and in the unknowable descendants who will follow. It is in the understanding that we could never be born other than the time and place we were. And it is in knowing that it was Caroline and my union that determined all those who follow us.

 

It is when I look back on the sweet memories of our married life, and ahead to the yet unknown lives of our children, grandchildren, and their children (yet to be born) that I best understand the passage of time.