Time & Perspective Quote by A. B. Yehoshua

Yehoshua draws a sly border between the clean satisfaction of verdicts and the messy, endless churn of lived experience. The image of “put a dot, a stop” is deliberately small and domestic: truth reduced to punctuation, an act of formatting. It’s a jab at our craving for closure, for the comfort of a sentence that ends. In court, that craving is operational; society needs decisions to function, even if they’re imperfect. A judge’s truth is less metaphysical than procedural: it’s the truth that allows the world to move on.

Then Yehoshua pivots to the historian, and the tone opens into something like a warning. “There’s never an end to the past” isn’t just about scholarly diligence; it’s about the past’s refusal to stay past. For an Israeli novelist steeped in political argument and generational memory, this reads as cultural diagnosis. Nations built on contested narratives want judges: authorities who can declare the story settled. But history doesn’t obey that civic demand. It keeps reappearing through new archives, new witnesses, new moral languages, new traumas that won’t metabolize.

The repetition - “on and on and on” - is the real engine here. It mimics obsession, the recursive return of unresolved inheritance. Yehoshua is also defending the novelist’s terrain: fiction as the place where truth can’t be punctuated into obedience. The subtext is blunt: closure is a public necessity, not an epistemic achievement. The past remains alive precisely because power keeps trying to finalize it.