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As the Years Go Rolling By

Drinking Problems in the Time Dimension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Griffith Edwards
Griffith Edwards*
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychiatry, Addiction Research Unit, 101 Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AF
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Extract

Research which tries to understand human experience within the time dimension is entering difficult and uncomfortable territory. Long before the first prospecting research worker arrived on this scene with his questionnaires and statistical methods, creative writers had been exploring the same terrain. Take poetry, for instance. When poets write about the passage of time the visions which they conjure seem nearly always to carry menace. An image offered by Yeats exactly captures the sense of helplessness and haplessness which we may all sometimes experience under the pressure of passing time:

The years like great black oxen tread the world.

And God the herdsman goads them on behind.

And I am broken by their passing feet.

Type
Lecture
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 154 , Issue 1 , January 1989 , pp. 18 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

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