Time & Perspective Quote by Edward Young

The future, in Edward Young's hands, isn't a clean arrow pointing forward; it's a stodgy dessert that keeps refusing to set. Calling it a "unified dream" sets up the target: the Enlightenment appetite for system, progress, and tidy narratives where tomorrow coherently fulfills today. Then Young punctures that confidence with domestic comedy. A mince pie is seasonal, indulgent, and faintly ridiculous as a governing metaphor for destiny. It's also slow, sticky labor: you wait, you check, you wait again. The wit isn't just in the mismatch between metaphysical scale and kitchen imagery; it's in the sense that our grandest projections are made of the same anxious habits as hovering over an oven.

"Long in the baking" carries a moral undertone typical of Young's era: time is not a neutral medium but a test. His century lived with high mortality, religious argument, and political volatility; the future was less a tech brochure than a suspense plot. By adding "never quite done", he turns anticipation into a kind of torment. Not disaster, not revelation - just perpetual almost. The line traps you in the experience of waiting for closure that never arrives, a satire of human planning and a quiet rebuke to complacency.

Young's intent feels less prophetic than diagnostic. He is naming a psychological condition: our need to imagine completion, and the way reality keeps serving us "nearly". The future is not a destination; it's an undercooked promise.