"Time has been transformed, and we have changed; it has advanced and set us in motion; it has unveiled its face, inspiring us with bewilderment and exhilaration"
About this Quote
Time, in Gibran's hands, stops being the neutral backdrop we pretend it is and becomes an active force with a personality, even a face. That’s the first quiet provocation here: modern life likes to talk about time as something we manage, save, waste, hack. Gibran flips the power dynamic. Time is the agent; we are the ones acted upon. The repeated “it has” lands like a drumbeat of inevitability, insisting that change isn’t a personal project or a self-help goal but the basic condition of being alive.
The line “we have changed” reads almost like a concession, as if the speaker is surprised to find himself altered. That’s the subtext: transformation happens behind our backs. “Advanced and set us in motion” carries the sense of a world accelerating, a distinctly early-20th-century feeling when industrial modernity, migration, and war rearranged ordinary existence. Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant writing across Arabic and English worlds, understood time not as a gentle seasonality but as dislocation: leaving, arriving, becoming legible in a new place.
Then comes the pivot from mechanics to revelation: time “unveiled its face.” The metaphor suggests an intimate encounter, like a veil lifted at a threshold moment. What’s inspired isn’t calm acceptance but “bewilderment and exhilaration,” emotions that travel together when the old map fails and a larger horizon appears. Gibran’s intent isn’t to soothe; it’s to dignify the vertigo of change, to frame uncertainty as evidence that life is actually moving.
The line “we have changed” reads almost like a concession, as if the speaker is surprised to find himself altered. That’s the subtext: transformation happens behind our backs. “Advanced and set us in motion” carries the sense of a world accelerating, a distinctly early-20th-century feeling when industrial modernity, migration, and war rearranged ordinary existence. Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant writing across Arabic and English worlds, understood time not as a gentle seasonality but as dislocation: leaving, arriving, becoming legible in a new place.
Then comes the pivot from mechanics to revelation: time “unveiled its face.” The metaphor suggests an intimate encounter, like a veil lifted at a threshold moment. What’s inspired isn’t calm acceptance but “bewilderment and exhilaration,” emotions that travel together when the old map fails and a larger horizon appears. Gibran’s intent isn’t to soothe; it’s to dignify the vertigo of change, to frame uncertainty as evidence that life is actually moving.
Quote Details
| Topic | Time |
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