Time & Perspective Quote by Mika Waltari

Waltari’s voice here is the postwar novelist’s antidote to both panic and consolation: he’s seen enough history up close to stop taking fear seriously, but also enough of ideology to stop buying comfort. “Vain dread” isn’t bravery; it’s fatigue. Loss has worn the reflexes off him. That’s the first move: a refusal to be governed by emotion that can be exploited.

Then he swivels to the grander sedative: “the hope of immortality.” It lands like an exhausted eye-roll at metaphysics, but the target is broader than religion. By lumping immortality with “gods and kings,” Waltari collapses the whole architecture of authority - divine, political, and literary. Gods promise meaning, kings demand obedience, immortality flatters the ego; he’s tired of all three because all three recruit the same hunger to be told your suffering is part of a plan.

The punchline is the most revealing, and the most suspect: “For my own sake only I write this.” It’s a declaration of artistic sovereignty, but also a defensive maneuver. Authors often claim purity of motive when they want to preempt judgment, criticism, or appropriation. The bravado of “I differ from all other writers” reads as both isolation and a dare - he knows writing is always public, always interpreted, always conscripted. So he stages a paradox: a private document written in public language, insisting on selfhood in a century that repeatedly tried to erase it.