Time & Perspective Quote by Mark Strand

Time, in Mark Strand's hands, stops being a neutral river and turns into strange geography. "Each moment is a place you've never been" works because it refuses the comforting metaphor of time as something we travel through knowingly. Strand flips it: the present isn't a point on a line, it's a location with its own weather, its own rules, its own disorientation. The line has the cool clarity of an epigram, but its real effect is destabilizing. If every moment is genuinely new territory, then habit becomes a form of self-deception. You can't rely on yesterday's map.

The intent feels characteristically Strand: to make the ordinary uncanny, to press anxiety into a clean sentence. The subtext is both exhilarating and bleak. Exhilarating, because it suggests a perpetual possibility - the world isn't used up, not even by your own life. Bleak, because novelty here isn't choice; it's fate. You are constantly arriving somewhere unprepared, even in your own mind. There's a quiet rebuttal to the fantasy of mastery - the idea that experience accumulates into control. Strand implies the opposite: experience accumulates into the knowledge that control is an illusion.

Context matters. Strand's work often circles absence, the slipperiness of self, the way consciousness keeps losing its grip on what it thinks it possesses. This line sits comfortably in late-20th-century American poetry's preoccupation with alienation and inner surveillance, but it also reads like a coping mechanism: if you treat the present as uncharted land, you stop demanding that life feel familiar. You start paying attention instead.