Must be Love!
At the end of one such meal we discussed, as we occasionally did, the difference in our ages. She asked, ‘Do you think that because I’m older than you are time passed more quickly for me than it does for you?’
‘Subjectively, perhaps’, I replied.
‘So does time seem to have speeded up for you too? Since you were a child, I mean.’
‘It seems to have done, yes.’
‘By how much?’
‘Difficult to say.’
‘Well, think back to how long a week seemed when you were nine years old. How many of today’s weeks would it take to fill a week back then? I mean, think about the week leading up to Christmas…’
‘Three or four, maybe. Easily.’
‘When you first met me,’ she went on, ‘I think the weeks were passing about five times as fast as they used to when I was a child. Now they’ve slowed down again. People say that when you get really old, time races by, like those speeded-up films of the sun streaking accross the sky. Dawn to dusk in seconds.’
‘I remember my grandfather telling me that time had accelerated so much for him that all he noticed was the changing seasons. He knew that time was getting on when he had to change into his winter underwear once more.’
‘Why does it happen, do you think? Is it some kind of chemical change in your brain?’
‘Locke believed that our train of thought moves at a constant speed, although Addison seemed to think that we could inflate our time by pumping it full of thoughts.’
‘Or memories.’
‘Yes, it must have something to do with memory. I mean, what else could give you your sense of how fast time passes? It’s a backwards-looking thing, must be. What gives you the sense of how long a week lasts is how long you remember it lasting.’
‘Which would partly depend on how much of it you noticed in the first place,’ she added, ‘because the less you noticed the less there would be to remember, and it would seem as though the time had been empty. Big chunks of time would become sort of … invisible to you. It would feel shorter than a week where you noticed lots of things going on.’
‘And a child notices everything, so when you’re a child each week you look back on seems filled with incident and novelty, so a week feels like a really long time.’
‘Which is why,’ she said, triumphantly claiming my hand accross the tablecloth, ‘time has slowed down again for me since you came into my life. My world is so full of new and wonderful things, I’m so much more aware of everything. When we first met I was sort of sleepwalking through life, but now I feel truly, fully conscious of every moment that passes.’
‘Must be love.’
– The Horizontal Instrument –