Time & Perspective Quote by Djuna Barnes

Barnes gives you a body doing something impossible so you’ll accept a mind doing something dangerous. “This head has risen above its hair” is a surreal little jailbreak: the self lifting off its own ornament, vanity, even gendered “hair” as social costume. It’s comic in the image, but not cute. The “moment of abandon” signals a deliberate loosening of manners and narrative sense, the kind of psychic dishevelment modernism treated as both symptom and method.

Then she makes the move that turns the metaphor into class politics of consciousness. Only “men” who have “drawn their feet out of their boots” get access to these “corridors of the mind.” Boots read as work, duty, posture, the armor of public life. To take them off is to step out of role and into a private architecture where thought echoes and loops. Barnes frames introspection as a masculine privilege and a masculine pathology at once: a fraternity of the unshod, pacing indoors while the world keeps its shoes on.

Context matters: Barnes is a modernist who wrote from the margins of the respectable, anatomizing the theatricality of identity and the costs of desire. This sentence performs that ethos. It’s not offering self-help; it’s staging consciousness as a haunted hallway, accessible through a small act of refusal. The subtext is that “abandon” isn’t innocence. It’s what happens when the social self slips, and the mind, briefly unpoliced, starts walking you.