I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 22
SWIFT, Swift go my days.
By rights I think time should drag with me, for I am wasting my portion of life as I live it.
But my days pass Swift—Swift, Swift.
They come, they fly away—before I know.
I'm thinking it is Tuesday: but while I'm thinking—Wednesday has come: and gone: and Thursday is rushing in. Tuesday, blue-and-gold or gray-and-silver, with its mornings and nights and bits of food and openings of doors and thinkings: Wednesday with the same equipment: Thursday the same.
Each day comes and goes like a flash of filmed silvered garbled light.
But there is time in each for me to touch the enchanted Everydayness: time for the turbulent sly delight of tasting, smelling, feeling the eternal humors and romances in each small thing near me—my Clock, my Window, my Jar of Cold Cream, my Two Thumbs. There is time in each day for it to make me pay a wearing glimmering feverish homage to the mystic daily godhead.
My life exacts terrific homages from me.
I am wearing out—frailly, tiredly, from a desolate uneasy love of living.
It is why my days go Swift when by rights time should drag leadenly in punishment for barbarous futileness.
There is not time-space enough in any of the days sufficient to love the virile green and the murderous red and the sweet pale surprising purple in the sunset above the west desert: nor space to love the smell of a sudden August rain: nor the flaming delicate Idea of the poet John Keats.
While I'm starting to love each of those to its height of love-worthiness—the to-day is gone: and the to-morrow, which must see a new love-game started for each Thing, is come.
But while I say 'is come': it's gone.
So Swift go my days—oh Swift, Swift!