Katy Bowman

I read an interview on The New Yorker blog with Lauren Groff the other day and I realized that I need to read more of her work. And by more I mean any at all because, somehow, I have thus far missed out on her genius.

Some quotes:

We live our daily lives among exquisitely varied timelines.

In the paragraph from which I pulled this quote, Groff is talking about how all of the different objects and creatures that surround us have different life spans than we do, some shorter, some much much longer. She declares her fascination for this and I now join her. Thinking about it sends me down rabbit holes of wondering how our life spans affect our perception of time and how a day for the dog laid out next to me is a much larger proportion of her life than a day is for mine.

Humans are the most delusional species because we expend so much energy trying to deny the passage of time and its necessary changes. Art, in some ways, is the attempt to assert human control over time, despite the ultimate futility of the effort.

This strikes me as so true because what is art but an attempt to capture a moment, a feeling, things that are so ephemeral the task is all but impossible?

There are seasons, internal clocks in nature, that quietly insist on the rightness of time passing.

This quote is pulled from the end of the paragraph that contains the quote above. She had moved from discussing human attempts to control time to the way time seems to pass without interference in nature. I thought this particular sentence was a lovely way of putting that sentiment.