Time & Perspective Quote by Cyril Connolly

Connolly draws a clean, slightly cruel line between writing as tourism and writing as citizenship. The “great writer” doesn’t just offer scenes; he builds an inhabitable reality with its own weather systems: moral logic, sensory texture, a rhythm of thought that readers start to breathe without noticing. The punch is in “proud to live in it.” Pride implies more than enjoyment. It suggests a status shift: the reader feels enlarged by residence in that made world, as if the book confers a sharper mind, a better taste, a tougher honesty. Greatness here is social as much as aesthetic; the work becomes a place you want to be seen belonging to.

The “lesser writer,” by contrast, traffics in short-term seduction. “Entice” is the tell: a trick of plot, a fashionable voice, a gimmick of feeling. It works briefly, like a shop window that gets you through the door. Then comes the damning image of readers “filing out” - orderly, unemotional, almost bureaucratic. Not rage-quitting, not scandalized, just leaving because nothing in the architecture asked them to stay. Connolly’s subtext is anxiety about endurance: literary value as re-readability, as a world you revisit the way you revisit a city you once loved.

Context matters: Connolly wrote as a high-critical gatekeeper in a century flooded by mass print, new media, and reputation-making machines. His standard isn’t popularity; it’s permanence. The sting is that permanence isn’t a moral reward. It’s craft, coherence, and an authorial imagination strong enough to make a reader feel at home - and slightly better for it.