Time & Perspective Quote by Clifford D. Simak

Simak takes the most ordinary phrase in the language - “another second gone” - and exposes it as a kind of cultural lie we tell ourselves to make time feel manageable. His move is slyly science-fictional: he doesn’t argue that time is precious or fleeting; he reframes “gone” as a category error. The second was never lost. It’s “the same one all the time,” a continuous medium we’re traveling through, not a stack of disposable units we’re burning.

That reversal matters because it shifts agency and blame. If time isn’t being taken from us, then our usual complaint - that life is slipping away - starts to sound like a defense mechanism. “Gone” implies theft, damage, irreversible loss. Simak’s line suggests the opposite: the only thing changing is our position. Time isn’t vanishing; we’re moving. The anxiety remains, but its target changes.

The repetition (“another minute and another hour and another day”) mimics the way we count down our lives: rhythmic, numbing, industrial. Then he punctures it with a calm corrective, almost like a physicist interrupting a superstition. Coming from a mid-century science fiction writer, the subtext is clear: modernity trains us to treat time as currency, but the cosmos doesn’t share our accounting. Simak isn’t offering comfort so much as a bracing clarification. The terror isn’t that time runs out; it’s that it keeps going, unbroken, and we go with it whether we’re paying attention or not.