Just as Mishka had come to understand the present as the natural by-product of the past, and could see with perfect clarity how it would shape the future,  the Count now understood his place in the  passage of time.

As we age, we are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade. We are familiar with the songs our grandparents favored, after all, even though we never danced to them ourselves. At festive holidays, the recipes we pull from the drawer are routinely decades old, and in some cases even written in the hand of a relative long since dead. And the objects in our homes? The oriental coffee tables and well-worn desks that have been handed down from generation to generation? Despite being “out of fashion,” not only do they add beauty to our daily lives, they lend material credibility to our presumption that the passing of an era will be glacial.

From “A Gentleman in Moscow,” by Amor Towles

In this snippet of gorgeous prose, the author evokes images of the passage of time in this classic contemporary masterpiece.  From the narrow space of a hotel, where he has been confined for life, a count witnesses how the Bolshevik Revolution dismantles the foundations of the old Russia and eliminates the freedom that educated individuals have taken for granted. The maelstrom of catastrophic changes swallowed even their most mundane endeavors.  Towles suggests that “the passing of an era will be glacial,” but I beg to differ.  Gentle evolution from an epoch to the next has not been the case throughout history.  We are again facing a difficult period.  It calls upon us to remain vigilant so that we do not witness the drastic end of an era that we have worked so hard to build for our children and grandchildren.