Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Auden

Time is raw, indigestible stuff: it arrives whether you are ready or not, chews up attention, leaves scraps of memory and regret. Auden’s line turns music into a kind of metabolic system for living - not a decoration laid over experience, but the mechanism that makes duration bearable and, crucially, meaningful. “Digesting” is the sly masterstroke. It implies work, transformation, even mess. Time isn’t “understood” or “measured” here; it’s processed, broken down, absorbed into the self.

The intent carries Auden’s characteristically unsentimental humanism. He’s not claiming music stops time or transcends it (that would be too mystical for him). He’s suggesting it gives time form: rhythm divides the endless stream into graspable units; melody turns passing into a narrative you can follow; repetition gives you the relief of return inside a life defined by no returns. In that sense, music is both comfort and discipline. It teaches you to tolerate change by making change patterned.

The subtext is modernist: in the 20th century’s churn - war, exile, accelerated “progress,” the collapse of old certainties - time feels less like a gentle continuum than an assault. Auden, who lived through that century’s ruptures, understood how easily time becomes anxiety. Music offers a model of temporal sanity: it admits finitude (every piece ends) while letting you inhabit the present without panic. It doesn’t redeem time. It helps you survive it, and sometimes even taste it.