Fitful continuum ...

... Waiting for the grammarians. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The fidgety student and the booming sophist have been dead and gone for almost two millennia. In Cavafy’s lines, they come back to life as though glimpsed in the faint light of a flame struck in the darkness of a tomb. Illumined thus, their thoughts, their gestures, take on a strangely monumental cast. The wool-gathering student’s musings come to seem, in their rambling way, as momentous as the battle of Marathon. The intervening centuries have conferred an inestimable value on the passing instant which it did not possess at the time.