Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Traherne

Traherne takes the plainest unit of human life - a “moment” - and detonates it into metaphysics. The sentence works the way his devotion often works: by refusing to treat time and space as neutral containers and instead recasting them as lit rooms in God’s house. “This moment exhibits infinite space” is less physics than spiritual perception: if you look rightly, the present isn’t a thin slice between past and future but a kind of aperture onto abundance. He’s training attention into a religious instrument.

The sly move comes next. He doesn’t stop at the infinity inside the moment; he posits “a space also wherein all moments are infinitely exhibited.” That second “space” reads like an attempt to name eternity without collapsing it into a timeline. It’s not just endless time; it’s an order of being where every instant is present, displayed, held. The subtext is pastoral and polemical: your panic about passing years, your hoarding of experiences, your grief over what you missed - all of it assumes scarcity. Traherne is insisting on plenitude, and he makes it persuasive by piling infinities until the mind can’t keep score and has to surrender.

Context matters. Writing in 17th-century England, with civil war and religious fracture in living memory, Traherne’s luminous calm is an argument against the age’s anxious righteousness. “Another region and room of joys” is domestic language smuggled into cosmic scale: heaven as architecture, joy as occupancy. He isn’t selling escape from the world; he’s selling a re-enchanted way to inhabit it, where duration itself becomes a sacrament.