Time And Change II

Manson Everard, Time Patrol, Unattached, needs to meet Janne Floris, Time Patrol, Specialist, in Amsterdam. On p. 477 of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol (New York, 2006), Everard arrives by timecycle in the Amsterdam office of the Time Patrol. On p. 481, he presses the doorbell of her circa 1910 apartment. Why has it taken him four pages to get there?

He talks to the office manager, looks around Amsterdam, reminisces about his previous visit thirty four years ago and his subsequent life in the Patrol, takes a canal tour, has eel for lunch and visits the Museum. Walking from the Museumplein along the Singelgracht, he passes through Vondelpark:

"Water gleamed, leaves and grass glowed with sunlight." (p. 480)

He sees a young couple in a canoe, an old couple beneath older trees and a group of shouting, laughing cyclists, remembers Rembrandt and Van Gogh, reflects on the life of the city:

"And he knew their whole reality for a spectral flickering, diffraction rings across abstract, unstable space-time, a manifold brightness that at any instant could not only cease to be but cease ever having been." (ibid.)

He quotes A Midsummer Night's Dream. That was worth a four page delay. My inclination as a Philosophy graduate is to analyze "...could not only cease to be..." but I have done that before. This time, let's just appreciate the prose and its imagery.