Time & Perspective Quote by Paul Cezanne

Cezanne isn’t offering a tidy nostalgia; he’s describing memory as a force that ambushes the intellect. “Impossible” does the heavy lifting here. It’s not that emotion tends to show up when we recall the past, but that thought itself becomes a trigger, a mechanism that drags feeling in behind it. The phrase “come on us” reads almost physical, like weather or fatigue: emotion arrives as something we undergo, not something we choose.

That helplessness is the subtext. Cezanne, the painter so often framed as disciplined, analytical, even architectural in his approach to form, admits that reflection is never purely formal. Time “now flowed away” suggests a river you can’t step back into; the grammar tilts toward inevitability, not romance. He’s registering the way loss hides inside even the cleanest acts of recollection. To think clearly about what’s gone is to feel the pressure of its absence.

Context matters: late-19th-century France is saturated with modernity’s acceleration, and painting is renegotiating what it can do now that the camera exists. Cezanne’s project was to rebuild seeing from the ground up, to make perception honest rather than sentimental. This line quietly concedes that honesty includes the viewer’s inner weather. The intent isn’t confession for its own sake; it’s a warning to any artist (or audience) pretending that looking back can be neutral. The past doesn’t just sit there waiting to be depicted. It pushes back.