The Years and The Days

A reflection from A Month of Sundays.

“The years teach much which the days never know,” said Emerson; they gather to themselves our hopes and fears, faiths and failures, loyalties and memories, allowing the past to assume an almost institutional presence, a corpus of authority and belief that guides—knowingly or unconsciously—our thought and action.

The days, meanwhile, come and go stealthily, like playful, errant, elusive gods, slipping away before we have time to apprehend them. Our attention can never pay enough tribute to these local deities, to the surprise and the routine of their daily incarnation, and never fix, except in the static glimpse of words or pictures, the fleeting hours.