How to Befriend Time: The Gospel of Pete Seeger and Nina Simone

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”

“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future.” A generation after her, Henry Miller placed at the heart of the art of living the fact that “on how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.”

We know...