If you're getting it done in one lifetime, you’re ahead of schedule.

From Alfred’s journal

The oak behind the Mercer place came down in Tuesday's wind and I spent most of today on the stump, counting. A hundred and sixty rings, give or take, which means some squirrel buried an acorn and forgot it while this country was still arguing about whether to have a railroad. I used to think of a lifetime as the unit things got measured in, that a work was long or short depending on whether a man finished it before he quit breathing. The oak did not finish. It was still widening when the wind took it, and nobody calls that a failure. If you're getting it done in one lifetime, you're ahead of schedule; the cathedral builders knew it, and so did whoever planted the row of maples on Dunning Street in rows too straight to be accident. I keep wondering what they thought they were doing on the afternoon they put them in.