On the Passing of Time

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.

Fiends in high places

The Eiffel Tower as seen from the Louvre

Broken Hallelujah

One of my favourite shots of the Louvre at night. The combination of dark earthly hues and brilliant light, not to mention the blurring that occurs in the bottom-right corner, evoke the look of the music video of Jeff Buckley playing his take on Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

Night of infinite resignation

When my landlords went away on holiday, I found myself in a funny situation. I had only been living in their apartment for three weeks, and now I was being entrusted with an apartment in Paris Ouest. My landlords clearly had confidence in me – a flattering thought, to say the least. But was I really up to the task of looking after their abode? Indeed, I had my doubts, and these doubts later proved prescient.

At first, living comme un petit prince seemed a good idea. For the first time in my life, I was occupying a lavish apartment in the bourgeois quarter that is the 16th Arrondissement. The apartment also happened to be owned by serious art lovers, for upon entering it, one was struck by the Italian Renaissance painting on the wall. To be fair, the canvas was not the original work of the Cinquecento (which is hung in the Louvre), but rather an eighteenth century copy. Nonetheless, the mere fact that my landlords would even buy such a painting at an auction house spoke volumes about their social standing. And that was not the only item of note there, for one could turn left into the living room and be greeted by a myriad of cultural icons including African masks, Indian figurines, and portraits of French Enlightenment writers. A lover of books would also notice in the corner the shelf holding a fine collection of Plato’s dialogues, their gold-encrusted covers suggesting the inherent value of ideas contained within them.

Should one then head towards the bedrooms, one would quickly note the shelves upon shelves of books taking up half the corridor and stretching its length. What was notable was the sheer variety of books on offer: art history coffee table books, philosophy essays, comic books, novels, scientific texts, travel guides, secondary school textbooks, English language guides, and books on the philosophy of art, to name but some of the genres on offer. With so many books at my fingertips, I felt a conscious need to make use of them. Compared to my landlords, I was a philistine who couldn’t recognise a novel by Stendhal if I had to. Hence the education to which I now had access was one that I embraced with a great deal of relish.

It just so happened that the week my landlords were away was also a week of study break. I hence found myself in a position of not having to wake up early to go to lectures. In addition, I was not obliged to take the metro, because there were no places I had to visit urgently. As much as I admired the metro for being cheap and convenient, the daily ritual of taking the metro to catch early-morning Italian lectures had begun to take its toll on me.  Hearing the hiss as doors open, the sound of wheels scraping against the track, the apocalyptic siren indicating the closing of doors, was enough to drive anyone insane.

My respite from those infernal phenomena only lasted a few days, however, when I decided to visit the Père Lachaise Cemetery in the 20th Arrondissement. Being relatively new to Paris, I was still finding my way around the city and was reluctant to find it on foot. But before I had left the apartment, I had taken photos from the balcony. I had discovered that the Eiffel Tower was visible from the balcony and wanted to photograph the tower as proof of my being in the capital.

On reflection, however, not only was that an exercise in vanity, but it also nearly got me in deep trouble. Coming back to the apartment after spending a few hours walking among tombstones, I sensed that something was wrong. It was dark, and the normally warm apartment was the same temperature as outside. Wind was blowing the curtains into the living room. The French doors were open! At that point, I felt as if I would die of fear. My immediate thought was that burglars had infiltrated the apartment and had stolen the items on offer. Gone was the Leonardo, gone was the library, gone was my sense of responsibility. Any hope of remaining holed in the apartment dissolved before my eyes, as I considered how my landlords would come back from the Greek islands, see the empty spaces which their treasures use to occupy, and kill me.

But was I thinking too far ahead? I had a look around the apartment, and to my relief, nothing seemed to have been stolen: the books were still on the shelf; the paintings were still in their usual positions, although to be fair, Montaigne’s eyes were now penetrating mine, as if he were aware of what had taken place. If he could talk, would he tattle on me to my landlords? That was a question to which I had no clear answer; however, I did assume he would not attempt to do so. Apartments are funny things, for however advanced their security systems are, the simple failure to secure a window can spell disaster. At the same time, the realisation that the apartment was on the second story helped to assuage my fears, as no burglar would have been able to reach that open window without resorting to a huge ladder, whose appearance would have probably stood out like a burning car on an otherwise quiet street.

But sleep would elude me that night. Being an old apartment, its floors creak as you walk on them; the same goes for the apartments above and below it. As I lay in bed thinking of my sheer stupidity, I heard the sound of floors creaking. Someone somewhere was walking around in the building. But where were they exactly? Could it be that a burglar had broken into the apartment and had hidden himself in the guest bedroom? Was he coming towards me with a knife, a look of murderous intent in his eyes? I didn’t know what was going on; whether I was just being paranoid, or whether a more serious happening was about to involve me. So in my distress, I hid myself under my blanket and played dead.

When my landlords came back from overseas, I explained everything to them. I told them about my opening the French doors and taking a photo. I told them about how the doors must have not been closed properly. I told them about coming back from visiting the cemetery and finding the wind blowing into the apartment. I couldn’t do any less; my guilty conscience would have driven me mad, otherwise. But at the same time, I feared how they would respond to my story, and whether I would be required to look for a new place that day. But my landlady took the story incredibly well. She did her own search and found nothing out of place. She even thanked me for my honesty. It was a relief to get that episode out of the way, and I would do anything to avoid going through it again.