Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Ondaatje

The line refuses the comforting fantasy that history stays put. Ondaatje’s “still” carries a double charge: the past persists, and it is quiet in the way a minefield is quiet. Calling it a “place” makes memory spatial and navigable, not a tidy timeline but a terrain you can wander into, get lost in, or be ambushed by. Then he twists the knife with “for us,” a sly admission that the danger isn’t abstract. It’s communal, political, and intimate: the past remains volatile precisely because we keep living inside its unfinished arguments.

The subtext is classic Ondaatje: identity as a collage of fragments, nations as stories with missing pages. “Not safely settled” suggests property disputes, borders, and the kind of peace that only exists on paper. It’s an ethical warning shot at nostalgia and official narratives that pretend closure. If the past were “settled,” it could be filed away, monetized, turned into heritage. Ondaatje implies it can’t, because it contains the unburied - wars, migrations, erased lives, private betrayals - that return as symptoms.

Contextually, this fits a writer shaped by displacement (Sri Lanka to Canada) and by an oeuvre preoccupied with the afterlife of conflict (The English Patient’s scarred cartographies, Anil’s Ghost’s forensic reckoning). The intent isn’t to romanticize trauma; it’s to insist that reckoning is ongoing work. The past isn’t behind us. It’s under our feet, and the ground hasn’t stopped moving.