Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje’s opener is a sly anti-contract: it promises narrative pleasure, but refuses narrative efficiency. “Trust me” sounds like the bland reassurance of a tour guide, yet it’s also the oldest novelist’s trick in the book: the demand that you surrender your impatience to someone else’s pacing. He makes that demand explicit, then immediately undercuts it with humility. The “order” he offers is “very faint, very human” - not the clean architecture of plot points, but the kind of half-seen pattern you find in memory, in cities, in relationships. That adjective “faint” is doing the real work: it preemptively excuses digression as method, not failure.

The quote is also a quiet manifesto against a culture that treats reading like a productivity hack. Ondaatje’s novels (and his broader literary lineage) thrive on collage: fragments, sensuous detail, leaps in time, the sense that meaning accrues sideways. “This will take time” is not a warning; it’s a defense of time as the medium of art. He’s asking for a slower kind of attention, where confusion isn’t a bug but a precondition.

“Meander if you want to get to town” flips the GPS logic of modern storytelling. The shortest route isn’t the point; the point is what you notice when you stop optimizing. “Town” stands in for arrival, comprehension, closure - and Ondaatje suggests the only honest way there is through wandering, the way humans actually think and feel.