Time Shelter

No one has yet invented a gas mask and a bomb shelter against time.

—Gaustine, “Time Shelter,” 1939

But which is our organ of time—tell me that if you can.

—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter

Man is the only working time machine we have now.

—Gaustine, “Against Utopias,” 2001

Where can we live but days?

—Philip Larkin, “Days”

Oh, yesterday came suddenly . . .

—Lennon/McCartney

. . . If the street were time and he at the end of the street . . .

—T. S. Eliot, “The Boston Evening Transcript”

Yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday . . .

—Gaustine/Shakespeare

The novel comes as an emergency, with lights blazing and siren blaring.

—Gaustine, “Emergency Novel. Brief Theory and Practice”

. . . and God will call the past to account.

—Ecclesiastes 3:15

The past differs from the present in one essential way—it never flows in one direction.

—Gaustine, A Physics of the Past, 1905

Once, when she was little, she drew an animal, absolutely unrecognizable.

What is it? I asked.

Sometimes it’s a shark, sometimes a lion, and sometimes a cloud, she replied.

Aha, so what is it now?

Now it’s a hiding place.

—G.G., Beginnings and Endings