Study Questions
1. What two aspects of Nature invade the house in Chapter II of Time Passes?

2. How are these aspects of Nature personified? What do they do?

3. In Chapter III, “divine goodness” is personified. What does it do?

4. What do the “stray airs” in Chapter IV find in the house?

5. Describe Mrs. McNab, the care-taker.

6. What do we learn about Prue Ramsay in Chapter VI? about Andrew Ramsay?

7. What change does summer bring in Chapter VI?

8. In a passage near the end of Chapter VI, we are told “the mirror has broken.” What is the mirror? Why has it broken?

9. What explanation is given for the publication of Mr. Carmichael’s poems.

10. In Chapter VII we learn that night and day, month and year run shapelessly together? What is the reason for that?

Answers
1. The aspects of Nature which invade the house are the dark and the wind.

2. The darkness creeps in the keyholes and crevices, steals round window blinds, swallows up jugs and basins and flowers, and furniture. The wind creeps around corners, ventures indoors, questions and wonders (“Would the wallpaper hang much longer?”), smoothly brushes the walls, asks the wallpaper and books and letters, “How long will they endure?”

3. Divine goodness parts a curtain, displays a wave falling, a boat rocking; he twitches the cord and draws the curtain. Our penitence and toil have awarded us only a glimpse.

4. The stray airs find hangings that flap, wood that creaks, bare legs of tables, saucepans and china, furred, tarnished, cracked. Only the clothing that people have left—shoes, a shooting cap, faded skirts and coats—retain a human shape.

5. Mrs. McNab is 70-years-old, toothless, bonneted, and bowed down with weariness. She lurches from side to side of the stairs; she leers at herself in mirrors.

6. Prue Ramsay has died in childbirth. Andrew Ramsay was killed by a shell in France.

7. Summer brought ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt which seemed to have the effect of repeated shocks, so that the flapping shawl was further loosened, more tea cups were cracked.

8. The meaning which mankind finds in nature is like a mirror. When all human meaning has departed (the mindlessness of war), then mankind cannot find meaning in Nature.

9. The success of Mr. Carmichael’s poems was attributed to the war; people said that war had revived people’s interest in poetry.

10. The natural rhythms of the universe, day and night, seasonal change, are disturbed by the universe battling and tumbling in brute confusion and wanton lust, aimlessly.