Parenting & Family Quote by Elizabeth Bishop

Bishop’s line lands like a reprimand delivered in a whisper: we are alive, we have air in our lungs, and still we act possessed by the urge to flip the world over and watch it run backward. The phrase “childishness” isn’t cute here; it’s surgical. She’s calling out a very adult compulsion to treat time as an argument we can win, not a medium we have to live inside.

The image of “rush[ing] to see the sun the other way around” does two things at once. On the surface it’s a physical impossibility, the kind of stunt a bored child might attempt: run fast enough and maybe you can reverse the day. Underneath, it’s the fantasy that fuels so much modern restlessness: if we move quicker, travel farther, rearrange our lives hard enough, we can outpace loss, regret, aging, even grief. Bishop’s genius is to make that fantasy look faintly ridiculous without stripping it of its ache.

Context matters: Bishop’s work is obsessed with observation, with the discipline of seeing clearly, and with the quiet catastrophes that arrive anyway. Read against her biography - a life threaded with dislocation and bereavement - the line sounds less like scolding than self-diagnosis. The “we” is inclusive, implicating speaker and reader in the same doomed sprint.

It works because it refuses grand consolation. Instead, Bishop gives us a bracing, nearly comic metaphor for denial: not tragedy with violins, but a breathless person chasing the sunrise, convinced speed can rewrite the sky.