Let us collude with necessity

“Let us collude with necessity” is Randolph Henry Ash’s intimate formulation of how to live within limits rather than pretend to escape them. Spoken amid an exchange about separation, time, and exhaustion, it joins clear-eyed recognition of mortality to a playful resolve: necessity cannot be abolished, but it can be met deliberately, together.

The Exchange About Time

The phrase belongs to a conversation in which one speaker insists on carrying their own burdens, while the other answers that they need not do so while he is present. The warning that neither will be there much longer makes their closeness inseparable from the prospect of its ending. When one asks that they not think of time, Ash does not offer reassurance that time can be stopped. Instead, he names the impossible wish to hold each beautiful moment still and observes that the stars nevertheless move and the clock will strike.

The passage does not treat passing time as a merely abstract idea. Its pressure appears in the speakers’ anticipated separation and in their awareness that the present cannot be prolonged by wanting it to last. Ash allows both responses to coexist: they can regret each minute as it passes, while still attending to the moment they share.

Necessity and Play

Ash’s statement that they will be exhausted gives physical fatigue its place in the argument. One speaker imagines a person dying simply from weariness of repeating the same thing; Ash replies that the human frame is made to tire, and that this is fortunate. The phrase “Let us collude with necessity” follows that acceptance. It does not promise escape from the body’s limits. Rather, it recasts them as conditions the speakers can acknowledge and play with.

The companion invitation, “Let us play with it,” clarifies the phrase’s balance of seriousness and freedom. Necessity remains real: bodies tire, time runs, and the speakers’ presence with one another is finite. Yet recognition need not end in passive submission. The verb “collude” makes acceptance sound active and intimate, as though the speakers can take necessity into their confidence without pretending to command it.

The Sun and the Moment

The lines that follow distinguish holding time still from making it run. The speakers cannot make the sun stand still, but they can make him run: the impossible demand for permanence gives way to a shared, energetic answer to change. Their reply does not cancel the loss implicit in each passing minute; it makes movement itself part of their chosen response.

The expression therefore binds mortality to companionship rather than treating them as opposites. Its hope is deliberately limited: not the power to keep the beloved, the body, or the moment unchanged, but the freedom to meet time together while it lasts. The phrase’s tenderness comes from that limit. It accepts the clock’s eventual strike without allowing the knowledge of an ending to exhaust the present.