Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje frames authorship less as master plan than as proximity: art made by accident, by sharing tight space with history. The elevator and lifeboat metaphors do heavy lifting because they’re ordinary and catastrophic at once. An elevator is banal choreography among strangers; a lifeboat is enforced intimacy under pressure. Put together, they suggest a particular kind of narrative authority: not the omniscient architect, but the witness who happens to be there when the doors close.

The intent feels like a quiet rebuttal to the myth of the novelist as sovereign creator. “The last three books” weren’t engineered from a thesis; they were triggered by collision - with archives, wars, migrations, rumors, the aftershocks of empire. Ondaatje’s work often lives in that seam where private lives brush against public events, and the phrase “moment of history” signals a refusal to treat history as a clean timeline. It’s a cramped compartment where bodies, chance, and consequence jostle.

Subtext: coincidence isn’t a cute literary device, it’s how history actually enters the room. Being “in the same” space implies ethical stakes, too. If you’re in the lifeboat, you’re implicated; you can’t pretend you’re only observing. That’s also an aesthetic credo: narrative emerges from contingency, from the awkward fact that meaning is often found retroactively, after the rescue or the crash, when you’re trying to name what just happened.