“In the life of a man, his time is but a moment”

“In the life of a man, his time is but a moment” is a meditation by Marcus Aurelius on human transience that becomes a recurring phrase in T. S. Garp’s experience of Vienna. The passage moves from a book Garp buys in a secondhand shop to a lens through which he sees the city, its institutions, and the vulnerability of the body; later, its remembered language accompanies his renewed work on “The Pension Grillparzer.”

Text and First Encounter

In a secondhand bookstore in Vienna, Garp buys an English translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. He had encountered the Roman emperor in a Latin class at Steering, but had never read him in English. The bookseller’s claim that Marcus Aurelius died in Vienna gives Garp a personal reason to choose the volume and encourages him to imagine the philosopher writing there.

The passage sets a short human life against a world of continual change. It describes time as a moment, being as flux, the senses as a dim light, the body as vulnerable to decay, and the soul as unsettled. Its linked images of coursing water and dreams make mortality not an isolated ending but a condition of bodily and inward existence. Garp’s mistaken or unverified supposition that Marcus Aurelius wrote the meditation in Vienna binds its abstract reflections to the city where he is reading.

Garp’s Reading of Art

The meditation also informs Garp’s developing judgment of literary art. He considers mortality a subject common to serious writing, but argues that a shared subject does not guarantee a shared achievement. Comparing Grillparzer with Dostoevsky, he locates the distinction not in what they write about, but in intelligence, grace, and art: Dostoevsky can make a reader interested in an indecisive failure, whereas Grillparzer leaves him bored by sentimental detail. Garp’s response turns reflection on death into a practical standard for his own work: subject matter alone cannot make writing succeed.

Years later, Garp encounters a critical description of Grillparzer as a complex, melancholy modern man. He accepts that characterization only in part, adding in his own writing that Grillparzer was also a very bad writer. The contrast underscores Garp’s insistence that a writer’s personal sensitivity or suffering does not itself amount to artistic accomplishment.

A Refrain in Vienna

As Garp’s stay continues, the meditation returns against concrete signs of age and decline. The parks and gardens seem to him marked by decay; paintings in the museums repeatedly bring death to mind; elderly and disabled passengers ride the No. 38 Strassenbahn; and flowers in the Rudolfinerhaus courtyard recall funeral parlors. He remembers the worn furnishings of the pensions where he and Jenny stayed when they first arrived, more than a year earlier. The passage’s phrases about time and the body recur as a verbal accompaniment to this accumulation of impressions.

The words surface in domestic conversation as well. When Jenny does not understand Garp’s mixture of pleasure and sadness, he responds by quoting the meditation’s image of the body as coursing water. His quotation does not persuade her: she simply shakes her head. Later, after visiting the Rudolfinerhaus, Garp tells her that she too will one day be dead, and privately regards the bleak remark as fittingly Viennese. The repeated meditation thus connects his private preoccupation with mortality to exchanges that Jenny meets with incomprehension or impatience.

City, Imagination, and Renewed Work

After his first opera, performed in Italian, Garp walks at night toward the illuminated spires of Saint Stephen’s Cathedral. A plaque tells him that the south tower was begun in the middle of the fourteenth century and completed in 1439. Confronted by the city’s old buildings and accumulated past, he imagines Vienna as a corpse and Europe as a dressed-up corpse in an open coffin. The meditation’s imagery of bodily vulnerability now expands into a vision of historical age: the city itself seems to him subject to death.

Garp’s response to Tina also shows the phrase’s relation to imagination. When she makes an offer, he declines and walks home, taking pleasure in his restraint and, as he suspects, in imagining her more than he could have enjoyed the reality. Her forehead mark comes to resemble an open grave to him. The episode is not a direct illustration of Marcus Aurelius’s argument, but it joins the body, mortality, and imaginative transformation in Garp’s perception of Vienna.

In July, remembering the meditation’s language about the body and soul, Garp returns to work on “The Pension Grillparzer.” The recollection marks a shift into the long-sought creative state in which the world falls under one encompassing tone of voice. The phrase therefore works both as a meditation on life’s brevity and as part of the mental and artistic transition by which Garp begins writing again. In August, Jenny completes the manuscript that will soon change both their lives and proposes travelling farther through Europe. Garp declines her invitation to take a train, saying he has too much work to do: the city’s reminders of transience have become part of the imaginative material from which he resumes his own work.