The Escapement

Once I asked him where the future was, that he could see it so plain. And he said, “It lies with the past, child, at the back of Time.” You couldn’t ever get the better of Mister Beguildy. But when I told Kester what he said, Kester would not have it so. He said the past and the future were two shuttles in the hands of the Lord, weaving Eternity. Kester was a weaver himself, which may have made him think of it thus. But I think we cannot know what the past and the future are. We are so small and helpless on the earth that is like a green rush cradle where mankind lies, looking up at the stars, but not knowing what they be.

Conversation as time travel

The expansion of the universe as it is occurring today does more than just stretch out the light of distant galaxies. It also stretches out and dilutes the afterglow of the Big Bang itself. One of the strongest pieces of evidence for the Big Bang [...] is the fact that we can actually see it, simply by looking far enough away. What we see, specifically, is a dim glow, coming from all directions, of light produced in the universe’s infancy. That dim glow is actually a direct view of parts of the universe that are so far away that, from our perspective, they are still on fire—they’re still experiencing the hot early stage of the universe’s existence, when every part of the cosmos was hot and dense and opaque with roiling plasma, like the inside of a star. The light from that long-burned-out fire has been traveling to us all this time, and, from sufficiently distant points, has just now arrived.

—'Twas but just now he went away I have not sine had time to shed a tear; And yet the distance does the same appear As if he had been a thousand years from me. Time takes no measure in Eternity.

A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do.

Truly, though our element is time, We are not suited to the long perspectives Open at each instant of our lives. They link us to our losses: worse, They show us what we have as it once was, Blindingly undiminished, just as though By acting differently we could have kept it so.

from "Domesday Song," W. H. Auden

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are to-morrow’s past. Even now we slip away like those pictures painted on the moving dials of antique clocks—a ship, a cottage, sun and moon, a nosegay. The dial turns, the ship rides up and sinks again, the yellow painted sun has set, and we, that were the new thing, gather magic as we go. The whirr of the spinning-wheels has ceased in our parlours, and we hear no more the treadles of the loom, the swift, silken noise of the flung shuttle, the intermittent thud of the batten. But the imagination hears them, and theirs is the melody of romance.