Sunday 25th September 2011
Am I the only one obsessed with time passing? It is a question I have asked myself time and time again without ever arriving at a satisfactory response. Every time I brought up the topic with someone, they never seemed to know how to respond. But that’s not to criticise them for being put on the spot; I wouldn’t know how to answer my question either – and that alone explains probably why I haven’t given up my search for one.
As can be assumed, my incessant and inexplicable urge to grasp time may be symptomatic of a profounder issue troubling me. Every day I watch the sky turn from light to dark while looking out my bedroom window. For me, there is little that can fill me with greater emptiness than the feeling that accompanies the thought of not having spent the day as well as I could have. And as is the case, there is little I can do to rectify that. Once night has fallen, the time to do anything of note has passed. And so I end up looking up at the dark sky wondering why I couldn’t have used my time better than I had. Inevitably, my lust for an incomparable day thus far remains unsatisfied.
But my failure to seize the moment only serves to make things worse. When the morning arrives the following day, I have already been filled with despair at the prospect of not being able to wisely spend what limited time I have been granted. This would all occur before I had gotten out of bed, let alone ventured outside. And there is simply no solution for this recurring feeling. No matter what activity I could be engaged in at any one time, it would feel like the wrong one. And sadly, I wouldn’t know what would be the right one. Knowing what constitutes ‘wrong’ can be grasped instinctively. And once I’ve known that I’ve done wrong, I cannot simply let things be. Even if I were to ignore my situation as much as possible, it would nonetheless unnerve me, never to let me in peace.
There is a statement that my form teacher in Year 7 once wrote on the whiteboard that I never forgot. It said:
“Wrong place + wrong time = wrong everything”
What always got to me was how absurd the formula was. How could anyone be in the wrong place at the right time? Doesn’t the suitability of the time depend on where one finds oneself? For one could be at the right place at the right time, I suppose, although the expression does seem a little verbose, if not misleading. It makes me wonder also what ‘wrong everything’ is supposed to mean, as if space and time could be conflated with everything.
Some people say that this kind of thinking is normal during adolescence. But it gets to me that some people can be so dismissive of a topic that has preoccupied me to a greater extent than almost any other.
There was this time in 2007 when it only then occurred to me that since I had been alive for fifteen years, and that high school would last for five, it felt as if I would be spending one-third of my life at that school. Even if I were to retire from school at eighteen, the difference would still seem, relatively speaking, rather slight. For the crucial matter of my not being very old at all would overwhelm the accuracy of any mathematical facts. That realisation weighed heavily on my mind for a few days. The simple conflation of five years with one-third of my life seemed to entail a great deal: that those five years spent walking around the same buildings, sitting the same exams, seeing the same chewing gum on the ground, and so on, could somehow equate to the first five years of my life – not to mention the second lot of five. In that moment of clarity, I came to realise that I may not have been as old as I had taken myself to be. It is of our nature to view ourselves as being older than we really are. When we are young, we naturally lack the experience that time affords us to reflect upon our past and see all our events in greater perspective. In those times, every day would feel like the rebirth…
The thing is, how much of the first five years can I recall? Very little, if any at all. Sure, I have images of my first school year imprinted in my mind, but the first four years are nigh on impossible to resurrect. That being the case, I would have expected the first five years to feel shorter than any other five-year period. And yet the opposite holds true. Even though my memory recall for that era is fuzzier than any other, I still perceive my first five years as being significantly longer than any other period. Even if I can see my last five years in high definition; even if the accumulated memories are tighter and more articulate than any memory from years prior to those ones – they hardly fill me with great marvel. If anything, my most recent memories – if we are talking in annual terms – are almost too banal and profane for me to want to give them any greater reverence than I am currently so doing. Maybe my first few years really were as marvellous as I have remembered them to be, which can go some way to explaining what William Wordsworth was going on about. Illusions of grandeur characterise all young ones partly because they have no concept of triviality. Everything takes on an enormous form and is worthy of attention.
But it is not as if all my memories of that period were so exciting and magical. Indeed, I can recall a time when I wanted to eat the glue paste we were using in Year 1 to stick certain papers to our scrapbooks. It was this thick, crystal-clear substance that I am pretty sure has now fallen foul of health and safety regulations. At the time, however, there were few school materials that a five-year old could come into contact with that aroused the stomach more than that paste. (And yes, I’ve only just realised that my first year at school took place following my first five years, although it’s now too late to revise this example, isn’t it?) But can you see? I have just given an example of one particularly trivial memory that really ought to have been consigned to the realm of the forgettable, had not the glue been so appetising at the time.
One reason why the prospect of unavoidable death is never grasped as seriously as it probably should be is because we have never grasped the significance of being born. For most of us, the first few years are a blur of images and sensations that have fallen so far out of sight, owing perhaps to an underdeveloped ability to recall the events. And even if we were able to, we would struggle to recognise them and make sense of them because our minds would have changed so significantly that we wouldn’t recognise ourselves in the experiences we were facing. What always astounds me is how when people talk about their youth, they always use a more limited vocabulary than when they are talking about almost any other subject. Even the most literate of people fall into the same habit of employing spartan, mostly-monosyllabic words to describe what life was like for them on their first day at school. In my opinion, this is a sign that since at that time they had a limited vocabulary, as their brains were still developing at a quick pace, they simply lacked the means to make sense of their world. Thus, the limited vocabulary they had used to understand their experiences at that time remains unchanged so many years later when they are recalled. And so even if one, on the topic of politics, can speak with the eloquence of Shakespeare, the moment they are forced to speak about their earliest memories, their way with words quickly degenerate in a way befitting a child. I see it all the time on TV when politicians would talk about their childhood, hoping to garner public sympathy. Granted that some politicians speak simply because they cannot speak in any other way, when others broach the subject, they speak even more simply than they normally would.
I once tried to calculate how old I was in terms of days. To my surprise, when I measured age in such a way, I felt so much younger, and infinitely more mortal. The passing of days is tantamount to a grain of sand being added to a small jar. And unlike the passing of years, which can feel like climbing one rung of a ladder after another, there are no palpable gaps between the days; they simply rub against each other to form a long, unbroken cluster. And while some of those grains of sand may stand out more than other ones, they are nonetheless finite. One day will come when someone will tip the jar on its head and all those grains will fall out, never to be perceived again.
Since I cannot recall what the day count was, I’m going to try to calculate the figure for today:
19*365 + 5 + 268 = 7208
If my maths serves me well, today I am 7208 days old. And I find that figure alarming. Doesn’t that figure look extremely low? I swore I would have lived at least 10,000 days. And yet I haven’t. It’s strange to think that everything I know: all my experiences and thoughts, all my pleasures and pains, derive from the 7208 days I have lived out. Perhaps its our ability to imagine what eternity is like (even if our limited minds find the prospect too confusing) that makes the grain count seem so petty. But it’s strange that I would react this way when 19 is hardly a large number (especially when compared to 7208). Maybe a year is perceived differently partly because we recognise one as a milestone. But still, our ability to be alarmed by one view of something and not by another is curious.
Since Amélie started Intermediate, I have raised the subject of time on a daily basis. I cannot seem to comprehend the fact that she could already be at that level of schooling. In my mind, there is a large chasm between Primary and Intermediate school that everyone has to bridge. But I’d never thought she would have already gotten to the other side so soon. I can still remember being in Year 7, which was only two years behind the start of my Grammar years, which itself is still quite a recent memory. Secondary school seemed to have ended only recently, and since it was my last form of education before I arrived at University, it hardly seems far away at all. And yet for me, the prospect of seeing my sister arrive at that ‘last form of education’ seems rather frightening. On one hand, getting to Year 9 would signal to me just how old she really is. Yet on the other hand, it tells me that I’m actually not very old, and certainly not any older than she is now compared to how old I was then (since the seven years and three quarters gap can never change). But either scenario seems patently absurd to me. In my mind she will always be a four-year old. I can hardly begin to imagine her as an adult, for the very prospect would require me to envisage my own adulthood – albeit an even more advanced version – a capability which I presently lack. If planning one year ahead is enough to blow my mind, what hopes are there to plan ten years in advance?
It is a truism that time moves faster the older one gets. I hold it up as a small truth to live by, for with each passing day, the idea it expresses becomes increasingly relevant to my life. Since I have arrived at university, the days have passed at an alarmingly fast rate. My first year went by so quickly that it felt like the passing of one term at primary school. And yet at the same time, it didn’t feel like that for large swaths of the year. I can still remember multiple occasions when time passed so slowly that I would be glued to my watch, hoping impatiently that the laws of physics would bow to my pathetic whims. Of course, my hopes never materialised and I had endured some of the worst days of my life. But looking back, the year as a whole seemed to have flown by without my being able to process what had taken place. It is almost as if I couldn’t reconcile the concept of an unprecedentedly quick year to that of a teeming collection of unbearably slow days. Even today, I cannot understand how winter could have passed by, and that we are approaching the three-quarter mark of the year. There is always this speed boost around September when winter transitions so quickly into spring that one doesn’t have the time to grasp the fairest of seasons before it has gone. In my mind, it is still around April this year, and that is strange because my waiting to find out about whether my application to Sorbonne has been accepted has taken up an enormous amount of my time. The waiting period has been stretched out so much over the last 7 weeks – and more generally over the last two years – that it is pure madness in some ways for me to constantly believe that the year has flown by so much.
Samedi Quelquechose 