Time & Perspective Quote by Cyril Connolly

Connolly frames artistic vocation as an accident that turns into a captivity, and he does it with a pastoral joke sharpened into menace. The artist doesn’t stride into destiny; he “falls through a hole in the brambles” - comic, humiliating, almost slapstick. But the fall drops him into “dark rapids,” a phrase that collapses romance and danger into the same image. Art isn’t a serene inner spring; it’s an underground current with speed, force, and very little say in where you’re headed.

The bite comes from what’s audible aboveground. The river “may sometimes flow so near to the surface” that you can hear “laughing picnic parties.” Connolly isn’t merely contrasting the artist with the ordinary person; he’s staging a cruel proximity. Happiness isn’t in another universe, it’s just out of reach - close enough to taunt, close enough to remind you that a normal life exists and you missed the exit. The laughter is important: it’s public, social, unselfconscious. The artist, by contrast, is solitary and subterranean, conscripted into intensity.

As a mid-century journalist-critic with a reputation for elegance and self-laceration, Connolly is also writing autobiography in disguise: the sense that talent is inseparable from thwarting, that the “calling” is less a gift than a wound you keep navigating. The intent isn’t to glamorize suffering; it’s to demystify the artist myth by making it physical, awkward, and slightly absurd. Creativity, in Connolly’s world, is a misstep that becomes a fate - and the world keeps having picnics without you.