Time & Perspective Quote by Charles W. Chesnutt

Chesnutt takes the oldest literary engine - the unreliable heart - and makes it do double duty as both indictment and salvation. Calling it "the profoundest mystery of the universe" is deliberate escalation: not the cosmos, not science, not God, but the ordinary machinery of feeling and motive. For a novelist who wrote so unsparingly about race, power, and self-deception in post-Reconstruction America, the line reads less like misty romanticism than a sober diagnosis of moral volatility.

The pivot is the craft. "One moment" to "the next" compresses a whole social order into a heartbeat, capturing how quickly humans can swing from cruelty to tenderness, from cowardice to courage. Chesnutt isn't excusing that instability; he's showing how it keeps certainty perpetually out of reach. You can build laws, hierarchies, and "common sense" narratives to explain behavior, yet the inner life still escapes neat accounting - which is why oppression so often survives on convenient stories about who people "really" are.

Then comes the risky phrase: "the divine image". Chesnutt deploys it like a moral counterweight, not a sermon. After inviting despair "of our kind", he refuses the clean satisfaction of misanthropy. The divine isn't proof that people are good; it's a reminder that even within corrupted systems, individuals can still flash with dignity, conscience, and imaginative sympathy. The subtext is political: if the heart can degrade, it can also defect from the script. That possibility is the quiet threat Chesnutt offers to any society invested in keeping humanity predictable.