Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance. On earth time… - Jhumpa Lahiri

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Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance. On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night, that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away. In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan’s hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton’s theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein’s contribution, that time and space were intertwined. He’d described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events. Something called time

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About Jhumpa Lahiri

Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri (born July 11, 1967) is an Indian-American novelist, short story writer, and Pulitzer Prize winner.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Birth Name: Nilanjana Sudeshna
Native Name: ঝুম্পা লাহিড়ী
Alternative Names: Jūmpā Lāhīrī Nilanjana Svadeshna Lahiri Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri Jhumba Lahiri
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Additional quotes by Jhumpa Lahiri

I'm flummoxed by this unraveling of time, I'm losing my grip on myself. I know that nothing awful will happen on the other side of the door. If anything, I'm about to have a perfectly forgettable day: a class to teach, a meeting with colleagues, maybe a movie. But I'm afraid of forgetting something crucial — my cell phone or my identity card, my health insurance or my keys. And I'm afraid of running into trouble.

Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night. She had no wish to overcome it. Rather, it was something upon which she’d come to depend, with which she’d entered by now into a relationship, more satisfying and enduring than the relationships she’d experienced in either of her marriages.

Eventually I took a square of white chocolate out of the box, and unwrapped it, and then I did something I had never done before. I put the chocolate in my mouth, letting it soften until the last possible moment, and then as I chewed it slowly, I prayed that Mr. Pirzada’s family was safe and sound. I had never prayed for anything before, had never been taught or told to, but I decided, given the circumstances, that it was something I should do. That night when I went to the bathroom I only pretended to brush my teeth, for I feared that I would somehow rinse the prayer out as well. I wet the brush and rearranged the tube of paste to prevent my parents from asking any questions, and fell asleep with sugar on my tongue.

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