84 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
Stayed up so late, attempted—quite unsuccessfully—
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all!
The Time Being is the interim after we have seen an en-
nobling vision and before we have been able to enter in to its
promise. It is indeed, the most trying time of all! It is the
time of “no longer and not yet”—between the dusk of yester-
day and the apocalypse of tomorrow. The Time Being is the
time when we must get ready for a future that we cannot
descry but which is bound to be either wonderfully hopeful
or dreadfully dangerous.
In such a Time Being we are apt to become weary in well-
doing, since even the most determined brinkmanship doesn’t
resolve the options before us into clear-cut and easily
grasped disjunctions : between black and white, between the
angels and the devils, between truth and falsehood, between
choices that really decide. “The Time Being, in a real sense,
is the most trying time of all.”
More than any other generation in recent history, yours