Uploaded January 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
The narrator of Valeria Luiselli’s 2019 novel Lost Children Archive reflects that “Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it…We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation.”
I feel powerfully the experiential truth of this observation, both in life and in writing; and would like, in my talk, to explore its causes and consequences. Without a sense of future, there can be no hope; and without a sense of a future, our understanding of the past is also disrupted. Indeed, our entire relation to Time—and with it to our lives and their possible meanings—is called into question. A post-Enlightenment faith in rationality and progress—reinforced by the 19th and 20th century mastery over Time—can no longer be presumed.
Claire Messud is a novelist and professor of creative writing at Harvard University. She is the author of numerous works of fiction, including When the World Was Steady (1995), The Last Life (1999), The Woman Upstairs (2013), and The Emperor’s Children (2006), which won the Massachusetts Book Award in 2007. Messud is the recipient of the Strauss Living Award granted through the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Radcliffe Fellow in 2004. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 2002. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The narrator of Valeria Luiselli’s 2019 novel Lost Children Archive reflects that “Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it…We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation.”
I feel powerfully the experiential truth of this observation, both in life and in writing; and would like, in my talk, to explore its causes and consequences. Without a sense of future, there can be no hope; and without a sense of a future, our understanding of the past is also disrupted. Indeed, our entire relation to Time—and with it to our lives and their possible meanings—is called into question. A post-Enlightenment faith in rationality and progress—reinforced by the 19th and 20th century mastery over Time—can no longer be presumed.
Claire Messud is a novelist and professor of creative writing at Harvard University. She is the author of numerous works of fiction, including When the World Was Steady (1995), The Last Life (1999), The Woman Upstairs (2013), and The Emperor’s Children (2006), which won the Massachusetts Book Award in 2007. Messud is the recipient of the Strauss Living Award granted through the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Radcliffe Fellow in 2004. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 2002. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
