"The distillation of a particular life, lived against the grain of time", its significance expands like the rings of a tree-trunk.
Growing against the grain of time, he feels time densely; the terror of transience and the tragedy of life's limits permeate this novel in a way that makes "Lolita" seem, relatively, a merry book, sporting an immigrant's amusement at America and connivance in its vulgar freedoms.
And the size of the grains of time would compare to a hundredth of a trillionth of a second much as that hundredth of a trillionth of a second does to the age of the universe.These minuscule grains would be a consequence of Werner Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle, an important part of quantum theory.
As Gerald Weissmann has argued, in his remarkable essay "Darwin's Audubon," Darwin, against the grain of his time, chose to take Audubon, the American rogue artist and amateur bird collector, seriously, and not just as a source of information but as a model of truth seeking.
I imagined teen-agers wandering in off the street, paying two dollars and hearing something that cut so gently against the grain of its time, while pointing toward other places where differences queerness, of one kind or another would be welcomed and, eventually, celebrated.
I imagined teen-agers wandering in off the street, paying two dollars and hearing something that cut so gently against the grain of its time, while pointing toward other places where differences — queerness, of one kind or another — would be welcomed and, eventually, celebrated.
Even then it felt like writing against the grain of the times.
ELISABETH BADINTER, a doyenne of French intellectual thought, loves to cut against the grain of her times.
It was written against the grain of the times, and the bien pensants, however much they secretly relished its satirical wit, were reluctant to approve it publicly.
Because Blair was going with the grain of good times, and the left never had much purchase against him until the Iraq war.
Whether he intended it as his epitaph, it does describe his life – both an artistic career worked against the grain of his times and a cheerful admission of the gap between human endeavour and its fulfilment.
