Time & Perspective Quote by Alexander Smith

Pleasure, in Alexander Smith's telling, is less a prize than a skittish animal: it shows up on its own terms, then bolts the moment you start acting like you own it. The line works because it refuses the Victorian fantasy of self-improvement as a reliable machine - do the right things, cultivate the right habits, and happiness dutifully arrives. Smith flips that logic with a cold little observation: even when pleasure has been yours, the memory of having had it becomes a kind of baited hook, pulling you back to the same spot where it no longer lives.

The subtext is almost economic. We treat pleasure like property, assuming it can be banked, repeated, scaled. Smith calls that impulse "vain" - not just foolish, but a vanity, an ego story where the self imagines it can manage its own delight. "Arrivals and departures" gives pleasure the status of a traveler passing through, which makes your role not the engineer but the host: you can prepare the room, but you can't force the guest to stay.

Context matters: a mid-19th-century poet writing amid industrial acceleration and moral earnestness, Smith is sensitive to how modern life trains people to chase returns - to turn experience into routine. His warning isn't anti-joy; it's anti-strategy. The trap is desire weaponized into control. What he offers instead is a bracing humility: make space, pay attention, accept the volatility. Pleasure doesn't reward pursuit; it rewards receptivity.