Time & Perspective Quote by John Barton

We live with an enormous blind spot behind us and call it normal. Barton’s line quietly exposes how arbitrary that comfort is: the pre-birth past is just as inaccessible, just as total, as the post-death future. Yet we treat one as a harmless abstraction and the other as a personal affront. The craft here is in the emotional asymmetry he stages. By opening with “comfortable” and “cannot know personally,” he invokes a mundane epistemic limit we all accept without drama. Then he pivots to “uncomfortable” and “stop engaging with time,” swapping a neutral fact (not knowing) for a loaded image (being cut off), where the fear isn’t ignorance but eviction.

The subtext is less metaphysical than psychological. We don’t just dread nonexistence; we dread the loss of participation, the end of being a witness with a stake. “Engaging with time” turns life into an ongoing conversation or project, something active and relational, not a mere biological state. That phrasing matters: it frames death not as a void but as forced disengagement, like being logged out mid-sentence.

Contextually, coming from a poet, the sentence reads as an argument for perspective-making: language as a tool to balance the scales between what we can’t access and what we can’t bear. It’s also a sly critique of modern self-importance. We accept that history went on without us, but we bristle at the idea that it will keep going without our commentary, our memory, our “personal” angle. Barton uses symmetry to reveal narcissism, and gentleness to make it land.