the.com/sands of time
Time as hourglass sand: you never see it move, only that it's gone.
means The relentless, invisible passage of time, noticed only in hindsight by how much has slipped away.
from Drawn straight from the hourglass — a timekeeping device using sand trickling through a narrow neck, used since medieval centuries aboard ships and in pulpits. The phrase 'sands of time' became a popular poetic shorthand by the 18th-19th centuries, with Longfellow's line 'footprints on the sands of time' often credited with cementing it in the language, though the image of sand as mortality's measure predates him.
- origin
- metaphor older than mechanical clocks themselves
- the trick
- sand flows at constant rate, feels otherwise
- irony
- hourglasses measure time by destroying structure
- cliche status
- used sincerely only in songs and epitaphs now