Alice Munro Can Move Characters Through Time

When We're Young, Everyone Over The Age Of Thirty Looks Middle-aged, Everyone Over Fifty Antique. And Time, As It Goes By, Confirms That We Weren't That Wrong. Those Little Age Differentials, So Crucial And So Gross When We Are Young Erode. We End Up All Belonging To The Same Category, That Of The Non-young. I've Never Much Minded This Myself.

His Air Of Failure Had Nothing Desperate About It; Rather, It Seemed To Stem From An Unresented Realisation That He Was Not Cut Out For Success, And His Duty Was Therefore To Ensure Only That He Failed In The Correct And Acceptable Fashion.

I Had Wanted Life Not To Bother Me Too Much, And Had Succeeded - And How Pitiful That Was.

We Live In Time, It Bounds Us And Defines Us, And Time Is Supposed To Measure History, Isn't It? But If We Can't Understand Time, Can't Grasp Its Mysteries Of Pace And Progress, What Chance Do We Have With History--even Our Own Small, Personal, Largely Undocumented Piece Of It?

In My Terms, I Settled For The Realities Of Life, And Submitted To Its Necessities: If This, Then That, And So The Years Passed. In Adrian's Terms, I Gave Up On Life, Gave Up On Examining It, Took It As It Came. And So, For The First Time, I Began To Feel A More General Remorse - A Feeling Somewhere Between Self-pity And Self-hatred - About My Whole Life. All Of It. I Had Lost The Friends Of My Youth. I Had Lost The Love Of My Wife. I Had Abandoned The Ambitions I Had Entertained. I Had Wanted Life Not To Bother Me Too Much, And Had Succeeded - And How Pitiful That Was.