Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Sheckley

A landscape, for Sheckley, isn’t scenery; it’s a slow-burning relationship that resists instant conversion into prose. The joke is in the time scale: 20 years to “get with” Ibiza, another 20 years of literary silence about Oregon, and the deadpan punchline - “possibly I’m almost due” - treats inspiration like a billable cycle or a delayed flight. That wry understatement is classic Sheckley: he’s poking at the romantic myth of the writer as a quick, rapturous noticer, while also admitting that real attention takes an almost absurd amount of time.

The subtext is both aesthetic and ethical. A place isn’t just a backdrop you strip-mine for atmosphere; it has to become metabolized, turning from a postcard into a lived system of habits, irritations, weather, smells, private landmarks. Sheckley’s phrasing (“get with”) is deliberately unpoetic, even faintly sleazy, which undercuts the sanctimony that can come with “writing about place.” It’s a little confession disguised as a quip: he doesn’t trust first impressions, and he doesn’t trust the writerly impulse to pretend they’re enough.

Context matters: Sheckley built a career on speculative fiction that often skewered human pretensions, bureaucracies, and easy narratives. Here, the target is the same old con - the idea that experience automatically becomes material. His patience reads like craft, but also like self-mockery: the awareness that even after two decades, a place might still be refusing you, and that refusal might be the most honest thing you can write down.