Time & Perspective Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis lands the line with the calm ruthlessness of a metronome: you can posture, plan, panic, or pray, but time keeps its own appointment. The wit is in the faux-commonsense measurement "60 minutes an hour", a deliberately boring fact used like a blade. By stripping the future of drama and turning it into arithmetic, he punctures two comforting illusions at once: that we can outsmart time, and that we can opt out of its demands.

The subtext is moral, not merely observational. Lewis is needling the kind of modern fantasy that treats the future as a realm reserved for the ambitious, the anxious, or the historically important. "Whatever he does, whoever he is" flattens hierarchy; no status, talent, or tragedy buys you a different rate. That egalitarianism has a bite. If everyone arrives at the future inevitably, then the only meaningful distinction is how we show up: prepared or distracted, attentive or anesthetized.

Context matters because Lewis wrote as a Christian apologist and cultural critic in a century intoxicated by "progress" talk and traumatized by world war. The future, in that climate, often became either a utopian screen or a catastrophic fog. Lewis refuses both melodramas. He reframes the future as the next hour, not a distant era, which quietly shifts responsibility back onto the present: the only time you can actually choose, repent, work, love, or waste. The line reads like a shrug, but it functions like a summons.