Time & Perspective Quote by Lanford Wilson

Trauma speaks here in the grammar of surveillance: “every truck, every building” turns ordinary urban furniture into a lineup of suspects. Wilson isn’t describing fear in the abstract; he’s staging it the way a playwright would, with props and set pieces suddenly re-lit as threats. The city becomes a loaded stage, and the returning observer can’t stop scanning for the moment the scene detonates.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “When I came back” implies exile without romance: leaving wasn’t a journey, it was a forced exit, and returning isn’t homecoming so much as re-entry into an altered reality. “For the first time last November” lands in a very specific American aftertime, the post-9/11 atmosphere when public space felt newly permeable, newly booby-trapped. Wilson’s dread is not paranoia as personality; it’s a learned response, a civic condition.

Then the kicker: “It has truly changed me something fierce.” That idiom (“something fierce”) is almost folksy, even a little deflective, like a guy trying to keep his voice steady. It’s also a refusal of therapeutic neatness. He doesn’t claim insight, catharsis, or resilience. He claims alteration. For a playwright whose medium is human behavior under pressure, the subtext is brutal: if the baseline of perception has shifted, so has the baseline of character. The intent isn’t to dramatize danger; it’s to confess the quieter catastrophe, the way fear rewrites the script of everyday life.