The speaking tree - Keeping Time

KUMAR VIKRAM





In A Passage to India, EM Forster makes an interesting comment about an elderly character, Mrs Moore, and her understanding of life. Forster states that she had learnt that life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually . To be punctual is variously described as arriving or happening at the arranged time, or as the state of being in time. But punctuality could also imply the arrival of the moment of truth at an hour arranged, as it were, between the individual and the moment of truth. Since that kind of power to either precipitate or postpone one's moment of truth is not granted to us, we find that most human virtues and wisdom are based on the premise that humans must learn to negotiate with the schism between what they think to be opportune time and what the pace of time considers opportune for them.Hence we have the idea of waiting, hoping, enduring etc.The Ecclesiastes in the Bible has as its underlying theme the impossibility of forcing things in life, the inconceivability of precipitating as well as postponing adventures in life. Its message is that there is `a time for everything'. The matter-of-fact but dignified statement of Vladimir in Beckett's Waiting for Godot underlines a very businesslike approach to life's appointments, even as life itself refuses to respond to us: “We have kept our appointment and that's an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?“