We assume that recognition leads to change. These essays begin where that assumption fails.
After decades spent leading organizations and explaining decisions to people who had to live with them, Tony Wynne went to his shelf of Roman books looking for a way to think about the distance between knowing something and acting on it. He found Cicero on the uses of wit, Seneca on how much is enough, Marcus Aurelius on self-command, Augustus on the quiet accumulation of authority, and Cincinnatus on the promise of giving power back.
The distance did not hold.
The Romans kept giving way to rooms they could not account for. A college conservatory entered through an unlocked window. A medical form with an empty line where family history should be. A meeting where work already delegated was quietly taken back. A studio wall holding nearly 250 concert tickets that belonged to a man who died young. A year spent trying to finish one piece of music.
These ten essays refuse the shape this kind of book usually takes. There is no method here, no framework, no arrival. There is a writer examining his own authority over the story he is telling, and admitting that the examination releases him from nothing.
The Time Between Knowing is for readers who have seen something clearly about their own lives and gone on living exactly as before.