"And what's fascinating in The Ten Thousand Things is that although there's time, an inexorable time of the three generations of lives, actively present, but place is the time, time doesn't really have to do with simply the human experience of it"

Robert Creeley's reflection on "The Ten Thousand Things" highlights an intricate interplay in between time and place, suggesting that the story doesn't merely record chronological human experiences, but transcends them. Creeley stresses "an inexorable time" throughout generations, indicating a timeline that is persistent and unrelenting. However, he intriguingly shifts focus from time as determined or felt by human beings to place as a personification of time. This is an unconventional point of view, inviting a deeper exploration of how environment and setting influence our understanding of time.

In numerous narratives, time is a direct or cyclical backdrop versus which human stories unfold. Yet, Creeley's suggestion that "location is the time" proposes that physical and cultural environments carry historic and temporal significance beyond the private experiences within them. Location, therefore, becomes a repository of collected histories and lived experiences, efficiently forming and specifying time itself.

The idea that "time does not really have to do with merely the human experience of it" challenges the anthropocentric view that positions human lives as the main metric of time's passage. Rather, time might be an essence absorbed in the physicality of location-- the land, the structures, the natural world-- all of which bear silent witness to human generations. This point of view posits that places encapsulate time in a way independent of the human dimension, suggesting that history is woven into landscapes and cityscapes, often bring the echoes of previous lives and occasions within them.

Creeley's analysis invites readers to reconsider how stories are structured around time and motivates an understanding that time is embodied in the layers of place. Such a view triggers a reconsideration of the narratives we tell, recommending that our connection to time might be more about the spaces we populate, which hold a collective memory and identity transcending individual life expectancies. Through this lens, "The Ten Thousand Things" becomes not just a chronicle of human lives but an exploration of the meaningful resonance of location throughout time.