Time & Perspective Quote by Walter Pater

Pater turns perception into an ethical deadline. The sentence moves like a single long breath, and that’s the point: he’s describing a life that can’t afford pauses. “Not to discriminate” isn’t about snobbery; it’s about failing to make fine distinctions in experience - missing the quick flare of “some passionate attitude” in others, overlooking how even talent carries a “tragic dividing on their ways.” For Pater, the social world is not a backdrop but a field of fleeting intensities, and the critic’s job (really, the human job) is to catch them before they vanish.

The seasonal image does heavy lifting. A “short day of frost and sun” is vivid precisely because it’s contradictory: warmth and cold at once, beauty edged by discomfort, light already rationed. That compressed weather is Pater’s version of modern life: moments of brilliance that arrive with an expiration date. His famous aestheticism is often misread as luxuriant escapism; here it reads closer to urgency. Attention becomes a moral practice, because the alternative is spiritual sleepwalking - “to sleep before evening” - a devastating phrase that frames numbness as an early death.

Context matters: this is late-Victorian criticism trying to justify itself against utilitarian seriousness. Pater argues that the finest response to an overmanaged, overmoralized culture is not louder conviction but sharper sensibility. He makes “discrimination” sound like survival.