Time & Perspective Quote by Brooks Atkinson

Atkinson’s line has the crisp authority of a man paid to judge endings. You can hear the theater critic in the staging: “Drop” is physical, decisive, almost impatient. The “silent limbo of the past” isn’t nostalgia’s scrapbook; it’s a trapdoor. The sentence doesn’t invite reflection so much as it directs a clean exit, with the kind of brisk pragmatism that keeps sentimentality from hogging the spotlight.

The subtext is equally shrewd. “Let it go” is permission, but also a rebuke to the culture of self-flagellation and endless postmortems. Atkinson doesn’t pretend the year was misunderstood or secretly meaningful; he calls it “imperfect,” a word that sounds gentle while carrying a hard verdict. Imperfect means you don’t have to redeem it, curate it, or transform it into a lesson with a bow on top. You can simply be done.

Then he adds the kicker: “thank God that it can go.” That phrase isn’t piety so much as relief that time still moves forward. It turns the calendar into a moral technology: the past is not only behind us; it’s discardable. In context, coming from a mid-20th-century critic who lived through depression, war, and cultural upheaval, it reads like a secular benediction for people who’ve learned that survival sometimes looks like editing. The intent isn’t optimism. It’s release, delivered with the clipped elegance of someone who knows the curtain has to fall whether the performance was good or not.