By Ayokunle Samuel Betiku
More than a century ago, William Henry Davies asked a question that has only grown more urgent with time: What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare. Davies’ poem Leisure protests against the kind of world which values motion over noticing. It critiques a world that has no time to stare meditatively like sheep or cows, a world so busy it can hardly pause long enough to be charmed and changed by Beauty. It is a poem about the cost of speed, written by a man who understood that a life entirely spent arriving somewhere is a life that never actually gets anywhere at all.
I keep returning to Davies while reading Merit Gogo-Fyneface’s Quiet Places, because the flash fiction feels like a contemporary and prosaic recasting of the same question. The piece opens by establishing two competing tempos. There is the fast-paced world of commuters pressed together before scattering like ants into their days, and then there is the slower and subtler rhythm of the town called Bletchley. The contrast is not merely aesthetic. It is a question about what this pace of life actually demands of us. The city’s speed does not announce itself as a demand. It disguises itself as normal, as simply how life is lived. But underneath that normalcy is a pressure of time and performance that treats time itself as something to be spent efficiently rather than relished. Time, in this reading, becomes disfigured, bent out of its natural shape by the requirement that every hour justify itself. Bletchley, by contrast, is where time is allowed to retain its own shape. That shape shows itself in a half-empty train, or in a slowly moving queue. Here, the frenetic gives way to something gentler and quieter, still exacting in its own way, but never coercive. That is precisely what makes it feel, to the narrator, like relief.
If the first two paragraphs establish a contrast, the third complicates it, and this is where the piece becomes genuinely interesting rather than simply nostalgic for quiet. The admission that the narrator sometimes wants “something sharper, louder” reveals a moment where the narrator’s own divided self briefly surfaces. This is not a person who has fully resolved the tension between speed and stillness. She is a person who has chosen stillness while still hearing the old argument for speed, spoken now through colleagues who treat rest, and stillness along with it, as fitting for only a single day out of the week. The piece is not arguing that stillness has won. It is showing a self still in negotiation with its opposite, which is far more honest, and truer to how people actually live these choices, than a clean resolution would be.
The resolve the piece reaches for is therefore not loud or declarative. It is closer to an unspoken, implicit acknowledgment of the soul’s actual desire, a desire that does not need to be argued for, only recognised. There is a kind of coherence the narrator is reaching for. It is not coherence with the crowd, and not coherence with the pace the city demands, but an internal coherence, a wholeness that only becomes available once the noise is set aside long enough to hear it. This is where Davies and Gogo-Fyneface meet most clearly. Leisure ends by suggesting that a life without time to stand and stare is a poor one, full but empty. Quiet Places arrives at something structurally similar—a state of mind, where she finally hears herself think, which is to say, she finally has room enough, in the noise of her own life, to stand and stare.
What both Davies and Gogo-Fyneface understand, a century apart, is that stillness is not passive. It is not what is left over once ambition and obligation are subtracted. It is an active, ongoing choice against a world actively organised to prevent stillness and make rest feel like failure rather than fullness. To read Quiet Places alongside Leisure is to see how durable this particular human problem is. Both works arrive, from very different centuries and very different registers, at the same quiet insistence: the ability to hear one’s own thoughts, to notice a late bus or a star-spangled stream in daylight instead of rushing past them, is not a lesser way of living. It might be the only way of living that actually counts as one.
About Merit
Merit Gogo-fyneface, a lawyer and creative writer with a passion for literature, faith, culture and meaningful storytelling.
As Founder and Editor, she oversees the magazine’s editorial direction alongside other staff writers and continues to develop Sarima as a platform for writers, creatives and thoughtful voices.
Through Sarima Magazine and its growing literary programme, she seeks to create space for stories and perspectives that inspire, challenge and connect readers.