In "Composition as Explanation" Gertrude Stein talks about the methods she applies to writing: continuous present, beginning again and again, using everything, everything being alike and naturally different at the same time. Stein also talks about time after the war, that peace will make time take new forms. She talks about the relationship between time and composition, especially the relationship between time, composition, and perspective.
Stein‘s two concluding sentences "And afterwards. Now that is all." could read, „I have spoken, here I finish my lecture,“ like a rhetorical formula at the end of a story or, if you know the lecture, „The only certainty is the present, a continuous now.“
