Skip to main content

Du temps perdu

Click to play

I'm learning a few non-scientific truths along the way. If you're older than me, or simply wiser, you'll be familiar with all these already, but I thought I'd share (pro), if only to fill up the space between the pictures with some text. Absente such platitudes, you might have to put up with more nonsensical Latin (...Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua, or some such...), since I can't stand reading blog posts that consist only of poorly placed snapshots. There should be some interesting narrative, I suppose, otherwise one might as well use Facebook or Picasa.
So (!), what I've realized in the past few weeks is that time—or perhaps, my experience of it (assuming there to be a difference, I haven't fully given up on realism yet)—is not a local train going about its regular, regulated, business, but a roller-coaster (Universal Studios Style). After a slow patch in my late 40s, when (presumably) the car I'm travelling in was being ratcheted up for the last great drop—or perhaps we'll go round again after this—after that dragging time, anyway, there were a few weeks of heady-light-headyness when time briefly paused and fluttered gently at the top of the incline... The week in Cushendun with my sister and her family (when this picture of Justin was taken) marked the onset of this quietened Time. And then everything speeded up as I could never have believed possible: the past month has gone in as a day or two previously; each time I stop for breath, it's the weekend again, then Tuesday—Mondays have disappeared almost without trace—soon, it will be Sean's 'Fall Break' (which sounds more like a serial verb construction than a half-term holiday, as my recollection of North American life rushes down the plughole along with much else in the middle past), then Christmas, then 2013,4,5...


The other familiar fact about the non-linearity of temporal experience (given that phrase, perhaps the mock Latin would have been better!) that I'm only just becoming acquainted with is that once time picks up speed early memories become increasingly vivid and clear. I got an email from Stay Friends.de the other day, asking me if I still remembered some school friends from a boarding school in Germany (the gruesomely named Landerziehungsheim Gut Honneroth) where I spent my 'gap year' in 1981—before the description of time spent abroad had been given been reified in the popular imagination—working as an English assistant. I remembered them all as though it were five years ago. But then, five years ago, before the train began to plunge towards the water, and the flash grabbed our excited horror in the tunnel before the splash, I doubt that any of them would have been familiar at all.

It's a funny old thing, Time. Telepathy, too :)


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Turbulence (Thanks for all the fish, and more)

[Note: this piece is not about about my family, nor does it involve literary or musical criticism. I’m not anticipating any attractive illustrations or other lures, and no musical accompaniment either. So if that’s what you came for, look away now. There will be more such articles in the future, I hope, but this is not one of them. You have been been warned.] Tokushima Naruto Whirlpool (Shikoku Excursion) Events of the last few days have left me, both literally and figuratively, in a painfully disordered state of mind. In plain English, I’m stressed, and my head aches. Actually, it twinges, rather than aches, but the precise description matters little; at all events, the pain ‘comes and goes’, as they say. (Where pain goes to, when it goes, is a puzzle in itself. I have this anthropomorphised image of Pain, like some peripatetic poison dwarf, doing the rounds of the neighbourhood: “Hi, Nigel didn’t want me this hour, so I’ve decided to drop in on you for a while. Don’t worry thoug...

Remembering Dad (Thinking about Madeleine II)

Over the past few days, I've been thinking a lot about my father, Gordon Duffield, who died earlier this year, far too soon, before we had a chance to talk. You might think that in nearly fifty years, we would have had a proper conversation, but though I told him about myself (too much at times, at times too little), and though he always listened, he only rarely shared his innermost thoughts, his personal beliefs as a man apart from his parental role, as a father and breadwinner; even then, when he revealed anything of himself, it was only in writing, never in conversation. My father was the kindest man I have ever known, the most forgiving of others, the hardest on himself: in all my life, I only once saw him lose his temper, and it was not with me. (If I can get through a single day without berating one of my children, it is a rare achievement.) He was a good man, without a trace of self-consciousness, generous and tolerant to a fault, and—until his last weeks—optimistic b...

Cambridge Blues ('Foundationed deep')

"I" Staircase, Trinity Hall, Cambridge  This weekend past, I returned to Cambridge with Ayumi, Julian and Justin for the first time in seven years. The occasion was a college reunion dinner, marking approximately 40 years of life since matriculation (1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 entrance years): about half of us (~50) from each annual cohort turned up to compare notes, reminisce, squeeze our sagging frames into formal evening wear, and report biographical highlights. It is worth noting that this was a self-selecting group: those with sufficient time, opportunity, income (it wasn't a cheap weekend break), self-regard and retained affection for their alma mater to trundle up; as bushy tailed and 'Hail fellow, well met', as age and misanthropy might allow.  Sic transit gloria iuvenum. I didn't have a great time, nor yet was it a disastrous waste. This is hardly surprising, since the curse of middle age is profound ambivalence about almost every extra-familial event or ...