Art & Creativity Quote by James Montgomery

Time, in Montgomery's line, isn't a neutral river carrying us along; it's a surface we stain with our fingerprints. "Paint the chart" turns history into something drafted, annotated, and unmistakably human. The metaphor does double work: it flatters our agency (we are the makers of the record) while quietly indicting us for whatever the record contains. A chart implies navigation and consequence. You don't chart for decoration; you chart because you're trying to get somewhere, and because getting lost has a cost.

Montgomery was a poet shaped by dissenting Protestant culture and reform politics, the kind of 19th-century moral imagination that treated public life as accountable to a higher standard. Read in that light, the line presses against the comforting idea that "time will tell" on its own. Time doesn't tell; people do. The archive is not fate's autobiography but a ledger of choices - laws passed, wars started, labor extracted, neighbors helped, speech risked.

The subtext is also about visibility. Painting suggests bold strokes, but it also suggests selection: what gets depicted, what gets left as blank canvas. "Human actions" implies the mundane as much as the heroic, a reminder that history isn't only made by crowned heads. Montgomery's intent feels corrective: if you want to understand an era, don't consult its clocks; look at its conduct. The line makes time a moral medium, and it leaves the reader with an uncomfortable freedom - the future's map is being drawn in real time, by us.