Not the least of the torments which plague our existence is the constant pressure of time, which never lets us so much as draw breath but pursues us all like a taskmaster with a whip. It ceases to persecute only him it has delivered over to boredom.
I think I’ll write that into a little handmade birthday card for dad.
My relationship with time has always been strained. I can remember the frustrations it caused me even as a child and they only got worse as I got older. Time has seemed to me to be both inexorable and untrustworthy. Deceitful perhaps on a banal level, but more profoundly it seems like a bit of a joke at our expense; existentially it’s not quite there is it? Of course on some level it seems ridiculous to express such thoughts. Everybody knows what time is. We don’t have to think about it. As Augustine says “if no one asks me, I know what it is.” But there’s the rub, if anyone should ask Augustine to explain it, he must admit that he does not know. Past is gone, future ain’t here and the present, well, where exactly is it now? Can’t quite pin it down.
Nonetheless we perceive the passage of time. And what may seem distressing is that as we get older the future seems to become the past much faster than it did when we were younger. When I was a kid I thought this was just more adult nonsense. I know better now. Or I know different anyway. My growing awareness of this change in time was perhaps arrested by years spent in graduate school which, in many ways, perpetuates the oh so very slow passage of time that kids know only too well. I can remember many a long morning spent under fluorescent lights in a cold uncomfortable room at some awful early hour discussing some text or other in ways that seemed concerned with maintaining the appearance of sophistication at the expense of any real engagement with, or God forbid love for, ideas. Time froze. Or maybe it was just the Zoloft.
But now that I am a working stiff, time moves much differently. Weeks pass so quickly as to leave me dizzy. But whereas time used to feel to me much as Schopenhauer describes it, it no longer does. Time does not whip me, not any more. It gradually shapes me as it flows past, slowly wearing away habits that once seemed intractable and occasionally bringing new surprises to the surface. Or something like that. So what’s the difference? What’s changed? Is this something inevitable that comes with age and experience? Maybe. Maybe not. For me the difference is a bit more profound: I think I may have learned, good Lord, how to be happy. I don’t know that Arthur would approve of that conclusion but that’s ok.
