There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

The line captures a recurring Williams theme: the necessity of escape when a situation becomes spiritually or emotionally untenable, even if the future is undefined. “Departure” here is less a confident journey than an act of self-preservation—choosing motion over stagnation, risk over suffocation. It suggests that clarity and safety are not prerequisites for change; sometimes the only certainty is that remaining is worse. In Williams’s world of fragile hopes and constricting social realities, leaving can be both tragic and liberating: a recognition that survival may require stepping into ambiguity, accepting loss of familiar ground in exchange for the possibility—however faint—of renewal.