Time & Perspective Quote by Robertson Davies

Davies nails a polite, devastating truth: plenty of “future-thinking” is just nostalgia in a lab coat. The line works because it refuses the flattering story modern societies tell about themselves - that we’re always moving forward, always improving, always bravely embracing change. Instead, he suggests the future is often a marketing term for restoration: a tidier, safer rerun of a past we’ve selectively edited.

“Notion” is the scalpel here. It implies a private fantasy dressed up as public policy, a mood disguised as an agenda. “Satisfactory” is even sharper: it frames regression not as extremism but as comfort-seeking, the emotional logic of someone who wants anxiety reduced more than they want justice expanded. And “idealised” exposes the mechanism. The past being requested isn’t history; it’s a curated highlight reel, stripped of its exclusions, its violence, its boredom, its contingency. People aren’t asking to go back to what was, but to what they were told it meant.

As a novelist, Davies is attuned to narrative self-deception: the way communities mythologize their origins and individuals rewrite their biographies to feel coherent. The subtext is cultural and political at once. Calls to “take back,” “restore,” “return,” “make great” - whatever the era’s slogan - often smuggle in a demand to reassert old hierarchies while avoiding the honest admission that this is what’s being sought. Davies isn’t scolding progress skeptics; he’s diagnosing a story problem. When the future feels unstable, the past becomes an alibi.