Wednesday 5 October 2016

Innocence And Time

Two strands of thought - sayings about time and reflections on innocence lost - came together in a quotation from WB Yeats:

The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;
-copied from here

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series spells out that time brings experience and knowledge and therefore loss of innocence in at least one sense. See here. Maybe experience also brings temptation and therefore loss of innocence in the other sense? And time travel adds another dimension.

The phase, "no enemy but time," would make a good sf title. In fact...here.

Anderson's Time Patrolmen have perhaps mastered time but must contend with several other enemies:

individual time criminals, including Stane, Charles Whitcomb, Manson Everard and Luis Castelar;
the Neldorians, a whole age of bandits;
the Exaltationists, a smaller but more sophisticated group;
temporal chaos.

Lastly, there is another Guardians Of Time.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I'm bemused at calling Charles Whitcomb and Everard time CRIMINALS. Yes, Whitcomb made a foolish mistake and paid for it with dismissal from the Patrol and exile to living in London a century earlier. But I'm not sure how Everard could be called a time criminal if all that he had done was ultimately approved of by the Danellians.

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
Of course we don't think of Charlie or Manse as criminals but they did knowingly break the law at the time.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

That is true! And there was even an attempt by other Patrol agents to arrest Whitcomb and Everard at Mary's house. That was when the Danellians made one of their very rare direct interventions.

Sean