Time & Perspective Quote by Luis Cernuda

Beauty, in Cernuda's line, isn’t a trophy to be kept; it’s a flare. The sentence moves with the clean fatalism of someone who has watched desire crest and disappear often enough to stop bargaining with it. “Moment” is the key word: not an era, not a life, but a brief, almost cinematic interval. Beauty is framed as time-bound by design, which quietly refuses the usual consolations that art, love, or memory can make the good permanent.

Cernuda was a poet of exile and fracture, shaped by Spain’s upheavals and his own outsiderhood as a gay man in a culture that demanded discretion or silence. Read in that light, the line carries the sting of lived impermanence: what is “beautiful” is often what cannot be safely held. The verb “passes away” is gentler than “dies,” a euphemism that makes the loss sound natural, inevitable, even polite. That politeness is its cruelty. It mimics how societies domesticate disappearance: lovers become “a phase,” places become “before,” a whole country becomes something you “left.”

The craft is in the restraint. No melodrama, no metaphysics, just a simple law that lands like a verdict. It also hides a dare: if beauty is defined by its vanishing, then clinging is a category error. The only appropriate response is attention - not possession. Cernuda makes transience do double duty: it mourns what goes, and it explains why it glows.