Time & Perspective Quote by William McFee

McFee lands on a deliciously unsettling paradox: the world is always peaking for someone, even as it grinds on for everyone else. “Terrible and sublime” isn’t decorative throat-clearing; it’s the whole argument compressed into a moral shiver. The thought is “sublime” because it restores grandeur to the ordinary clockface. The minute hand isn’t just measure; it’s a stage cue. Yet it’s “terrible” because it implies a constant surplus of intensity in the human system - rapture, violence, devotion, betrayal - all happening simultaneously, most of it unseen, much of it undeserved.

The line works by yoking the bureaucratic language of time (“every moment,” “every hour”) to religious coronation (“supreme,” “apotheosis”). “Apotheosis” is a high word for a private thing, and that mismatch is the point: passion doesn’t feel proportional; it feels like deification. For the person inside it, the affair, the grief, the revelation is not one event among many but the event. McFee makes that narcissism readable without mocking it; he treats it as a feature of consciousness.

Context matters: McFee wrote with a sailor’s sense of the globe as concurrent lives, not a single narrative. In a modern, networked culture where someone is always going viral, falling apart, getting married, getting bombed, giving birth, this sentence reads less like poetic exaggeration than a grim operating principle. The subtext is ethical: your most forgettable Tuesday is someone else’s turning point, and that should unsettle your confidence in what counts as history.