What strikes me about Shelley's words is not that beginnings are *possible* today—we know that—but that they're *only* today. She's cutting away the comfortable postponement we all practice: the waiting for Monday, for January, for some future moment when conditions align. A person might spend twenty years saying "I'll write tomorrow," yet writing only ever happens on the actual day their hands touch the keys. Shelley, who began *Frankenstein* at eighteen through sheer commitment to a ghost-story challenge, understood that intention means nothing without the coincidence of decision and present time.