Hard to imagine how unremembered we all become

By Ian McDonald

Which of us does not every now and then wonder about time, what is it, how can it possibly be described, what is a moment of it, what is an eternity of it? Saint Augustine in his Confessions tries to puzzle it out: “So what is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I want to explain it to a person who asks, I do not know any more and yet I affirm with certainty that, had nothing passed, there would not be past time – had nothing happened there would not be future time – had nothing existed, there would not be present time.”

One of the deep emotions I gain in reading good poems is that they fix events and people in time like vivid frames in the sequence of a film which you find hard to forget. Paul Cézanne said it about art but he could have said it about poetry: “Right now a moment of time is fleeting by. Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate… give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been before our time.”