Time & Perspective Quote by Wilfrid Laurier

Laurier is doing something shrewder than giving a genteel pep talk about writing: he is prescribing a civic-minded cure for a private ailment. The line pivots on a finely judged psychological read - an "active nature" that can’t bear the silence when the room stops moving. For a statesman who lived on schedules, caucuses, trains, and constant argument, solitude isn’t romantic; it’s destabilizing. Writing becomes a way to keep motion when the world goes still.

The subtext is a quiet warning about what unmanaged solitude can do to an energetic temperament. Left empty, it curdles into restlessness, obsession, or despair. Laurier’s antidote is not companionship but fabrication: "people it" with imagined creatures. That verb matters. He treats the mind like a territory that will be settled one way or another - by anxieties, by regret, by intrusive noise - unless the writer gets there first with invention. Creativity is framed less as self-expression than as self-governance.

In context, the counsel also carries a statesman’s faith in disciplined language. Laurier came of age in a Canada defined by negotiation: between English and French, church and liberal modernity, empire and autonomy. Writing trains you to arrange conflicting impulses into a livable order. The seductive twist is that solitude might become "perhaps attractive" - not because it’s inherently pure, but because it’s been furnished. He’s offering the friend a private parliament: characters as constituents, sentences as policy, imagination as the responsible way to be alone.