Perhaps I can put this differently. Beyond the negation of the biography of millions of people, the phenomenon of the perceived disappearance of time is uncanny precisely because it is the fiercest attempt by revolutionary politics to master and posit its own production of the temporal. Yet this production is not the production, not even at the simple level of an ideological or theoretical construction, of a simple or unique time. On the contrary, it is the positing of a multiplicity of times already from the side of the state. Thus, the biography of millions is not the only thing that is sacrificed if we neglect to take note of this. We also negate the complexity of the repressive apparatus that is made possible through this temporal refraction. This is remarkable on a different level, for it is also the indication, though on a purely negative level, of what a 'time' that avoids the dialectic of modernity would entail if we are to begin thinking it.

It is the political...

In English, consciousness and unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up ↑ and we fall ↓ asleep and we sink ↓ into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line, so that to wake is to cross a border towards consciousness → and to faint is to go back ← . Meanwhile, time itself is vertical so that last year is 'the year above' ↑ and next year is 'the year below' ↓. The day before yesterday is the day 'in front' ↑ and the day after tomorrow is the day 'behind' ↓. This means that future generations are not the generations ahead, but the ones behind. Therefore, to look into the future one must turn around…

∆ Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

I love this time – the in-between time, the time after all the gatherings and lights, the time before we swing back into the regular routines of the new year. It is the crack between the worlds, the place where dreaming can unfold and then spiral into being quickly and quietly. It is a place where, if we want them to, solitude and silence can surround us and the soul-hungers we have abandoned can find us once again. It is a time to listen deeply, to stay with stillness open to the impulse to move from the deepest part of what we are.

∆ Oriah Mountain Dreamer, (Oriahmountaindreamer.com, December 30, 2013) (via Make Believe Boutique)

The autumn sun fell slantwise into the yard, making the cobbles bluely shine, and in the porch a pot of geraniums flourished aloft their last burning blossoms of the season. Honestly, this world.

∆ John Banville, The Sea (‎Vintage, December 18, 2007)

Performing the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith.

∆ Marilynne Robinson from Housekeeping

All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call 'aware' — an almost untranslatable word meaning something like 'beauty tinged with sadness.'

∆ Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces