"Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you"
About this Quote
"Spend the afternoon" lands like a dare disguised as a gentle suggestion. Annie Dillard takes the smallest unit of ordinary life - a single afternoon - and treats it as the real stake. Not your career, not your five-year plan: the slice of time you are currently trading away while pretending it doesn't count.
The second sentence is the pivot and the pressure point. "You can't take it with you" is a familiar epitaph line about money and possessions, but Dillard reroutes it: what you really can't take is time itself. The phrase carries the cadence of folk wisdom, yet it’s quietly accusatory, as if the culture’s favorite excuse (be practical, be productive) has just been stripped of its moral authority. If the end is nonnegotiable, hoarding resources and postponing living becomes less like prudence and more like denial.
Dillard’s broader project, across her essays, is attention as a kind of spiritual discipline without the piety. Here, attention is framed as expenditure: you "spend" an afternoon the way you spend cash, except the transaction is irreversible. That’s the subtext: every default choice - errands, inboxes, vague anxiety scrolling - is a purchase. The line works because it refuses grand tragedy and instead indicts the daily leak. It makes mortality intimate, domestic, and immediate, pushing the reader toward a radical thrift: stop saving life for later, because later is the one thing you never actually possess.
The second sentence is the pivot and the pressure point. "You can't take it with you" is a familiar epitaph line about money and possessions, but Dillard reroutes it: what you really can't take is time itself. The phrase carries the cadence of folk wisdom, yet it’s quietly accusatory, as if the culture’s favorite excuse (be practical, be productive) has just been stripped of its moral authority. If the end is nonnegotiable, hoarding resources and postponing living becomes less like prudence and more like denial.
Dillard’s broader project, across her essays, is attention as a kind of spiritual discipline without the piety. Here, attention is framed as expenditure: you "spend" an afternoon the way you spend cash, except the transaction is irreversible. That’s the subtext: every default choice - errands, inboxes, vague anxiety scrolling - is a purchase. The line works because it refuses grand tragedy and instead indicts the daily leak. It makes mortality intimate, domestic, and immediate, pushing the reader toward a radical thrift: stop saving life for later, because later is the one thing you never actually possess.
Quote Details
| Topic | Live in the Moment |
|---|
More Quotes by Annie
Add to List
