The Long Afternoon and the Short Year

The person who promised to come between one and four has not arrived.

You have cleared a space beside the broken washing machine. You have kept your phone nearby. At two, you decide there is still time to do something with the afternoon. At three, you decide that starting anything would be foolish because the person will surely arrive the moment you begin. At a quarter to four, you stand in the kitchen and look at a clock that appears to have taken a personal dislike to you.

Then a message comes from a friend. The photograph is from a meal you shared, the one at the little place with the uneven table. A year ago today, the message says.

A year?

You can still place the glass that kept sliding toward the edge. You can recall the argument about whether to order another dish. Surely this happened more recently. The afternoon has scarcely managed to pass, yet an entire year seems to have slipped behind you while you were occupied with other things.

There is something almost insulting about this arrangement. If time is going to disappear, it could at least begin with the remaining minutes of the repair window.

We say that time flies, time drags, time gets away from us. These phrases feel clear until we put them beside one another. The same week can be exhausting to get through and surprisingly small when recalled. A short visit can stay large in memory. A busy season can leave a person with a full calendar and a thin answer to the question, “What did you do?”

Which version should we trust?

The temptation is to choose. Perhaps the long afternoon was an illusion, while the year reveals the truth. Or perhaps the year only seems short because we have forgotten most of it, while the dragging minutes were the real experience. But each judgment tells us something different. The problem begins when we ask one to stand in for all the others.

Consider what the photograph has actually done. It has not made you believe that a year contains fewer days. You know how a calendar works. It has brought an event close enough to feel recent, while the date places it farther away. That mismatch can be startling. You are comparing an accessible scene with the time that separates you from it. You are not necessarily estimating how long the whole year lasted.

Already, there is more than one question inside the complaint.

What has vanished?

Suppose you could open a perfect record of the previous twelve months. Every journey, conversation, small purchase and unfinished task would be there. You could inspect the evidence and settle the matter: the year happened. There were days in it, and you occupied them.

Would that be enough?

For some purposes, yes. A record can recover the date of a visit or explain why a bill went unpaid. But a person who says, “Where did the year go?” is rarely asking only for documentation. The complaint may contain a wish for more pleasure. It may mean that work consumed the available hours. It may express surprise at change, fear about age, grief for someone absent, or frustration at plans that never began.

It may also be an ordinary remark made while taking a coat from a cupboard.

We should leave room for that possibility. Every passing comment does not need to become a crisis of existence. Sometimes you are simply surprised that it is cold again.

Still, the question becomes worth examining when it returns often enough to trouble you. Before trying to fix the feeling, ask what it is asking for. More room in the day? A clearer memory of the days you have? A different balance between obligations and choice? More chances to be with people you care about? These wishes overlap, but they call for different responses.

A diary cannot provide a day off. A trip cannot repair every kind of loneliness. Watching the clock more closely will not necessarily make an afternoon more enjoyable. And adding activities to a crowded life can produce a very well-documented form of misery.

That last risk deserves attention. Advice about vanishing time often begins with a sensible observation and ends with a new burden. Do something unfamiliar every day. Make every weekend an adventure. Record everything. Build a life so full of memorable events that no year could possibly blur into another.

Now imagine receiving that assignment after working a long shift, collecting a child, buying groceries and dealing with the washing machine. Your life has already required considerable participation. The suggestion that it needs more events can sound like a complaint from an audience you never agreed to entertain.

I am interested in another possibility. Perhaps the aim is to have a better relationship with the time that is available: to understand why it feels the way it does, to make a little room where room can be made, and to leave a few paths back into ordinary experience. We can take that aim seriously without demanding that every day justify itself to a future version of us.

We also need to ask what a memorable life is good for. Memory matters because it lets us keep company with our past, learn from it and recognize changes we might otherwise miss. Yet the value of an experience cannot depend entirely on how clearly we later describe it. A meal nourishes someone who forgets its menu. Care can make a person feel safe without becoming a sharply dated scene. Rest does not need an interesting story to have been worth taking.

If a year becomes hard to recall, it does not follow that the year was wasted.

Hold on to that. It will keep us from turning a book about time into another system for judging ourselves.

The man who could not catch his own life

Laurence Sterne gave his fictional narrator Tristram Shandy a serious record-keeping problem. Tristram is telling the story of his life, with so many explanations and side paths that the telling cannot keep up. In Book IV, Chapter XIII, he notices that he has become a year older while his account has reached only the first day of his life. He now has 364 additional days to write about.

His solution is not especially promising. The more faithfully he attends to the details, the more life takes place outside the account. As he puts it, “the more I write, the more I shall have to write.”¹

This is a very old difficulty with an unexpectedly modern job description. Tristram could be managing a folder of photographs, a backlog of voice notes, or a personal archive that requires a second personal archive to explain its structure. The work of preserving experience has become another experience in need of preservation.

The joke works because the wish beneath it is understandable. He wants the account to do justice to the life. Why leave things out? A detail that seems minor may explain everything. A digression may be where the person becomes visible. There is something generous in refusing to reduce a human life to a few approved milestones.

And yet, an account has to leave things out. Even a very patient reader has somewhere else to be.

We face a related problem without writing nine volumes. To remember a life is to work with a selection. The selection may be rich or poor, fair or misleading, easy or difficult to reach. But completeness is unavailable as an ordinary human goal. We cannot spend each hour fully living it, fully recording it and fully reviewing it. The hours in which we attempt the task are themselves passing.

Sterne leaves us with a question to carry into the research: how much of a life must be preserved for us to feel that we have lived it?

More is not an answer by itself. More of what? More dates? More photographs? More stories of achievement? More conversations that did not need to achieve anything?

Think of two possible records of an evening. One lists the time you arrived, what you ate, where you sat and when you left. The other contains a single detail: someone who had been quiet for weeks started laughing and could not finish the sentence. The first record may be more complete. The second may give you more of what you wanted to keep.

This does not make detail irrelevant. It asks us to distinguish detail that restores an experience from detail accumulated because accumulation feels like protection. An archive can grow while the time to use it shrinks. A memory can remain valuable even when the date is uncertain.

There is a freedom in accepting the selection. There is also a responsibility. If we cannot keep everything, we can sometimes choose what receives a little more attention, what gets a trace, and what we return to with another person. The choice need not be large. It need not become a daily performance. Its value lies partly in keeping the past available without requiring us to live in service of the record.

Fast is not always bad

Imagine an afternoon spent repairing a chair with someone who knows what they are doing. You begin by expecting to hold a few pieces in place. Then there is a problem with a joint, a discussion about the right tool, a short disagreement, and the satisfaction of seeing the chair stand firmly again. You look up and discover that much more time has passed than you expected.

Would you ask to exchange that afternoon for an equally long wait beside the broken washing machine, merely because the wait felt slower?

Probably not.

That should make us cautious about the wish to slow time. Sometimes the phrase means “I want to enjoy being here.” Sometimes it means “I want this to remain available to me later.” Neither wish requires every minute to announce itself as it passes.

Research on everyday time experience makes room for this difference. In a small study that prompted people through their phones during ordinary weekdays, Sylvie Droit-Volet and John Wearden found that feelings about time’s passage related to such things as happiness and attention to the current activity. The same pattern did not simply appear in the participants’ brief timing tasks.² Being absorbed and judging an interval are not interchangeable acts.

The point is modest, and useful. A pleasant hour can pass quickly. We do not need to treat that speed as a defect in the hour. Nor should we assume that feeling every minute would have improved it.

There is a peculiar trap here. You can become so concerned with whether you are fully experiencing a moment that you devote the moment to checking. Am I present? Is this memorable? Will I later regret not noticing more? The questions may begin as care and turn into supervision.

Consider a conversation with a friend. Listening involves allowing the friend’s words to change what happens next. If you repeatedly step aside inside your own mind to inspect the quality of your listening experience, you may miss the next sentence. Attention can return to the person, or it can keep returning to your performance as a person who pays attention.

I do not mean that reflection is the problem. Reflection can deepen an experience, sometimes while it is happening. I mean that constant measurement has a cost. The wish to live deliberately should include permission to become interested enough to forget the wish for a while.

We will therefore use a broader aim than slow time. We want days that offer some worthwhile experience while they unfold and some accessible life when we look back. The balance will differ among people and seasons. During recovery from a demanding period, the worthwhile thing may be uneventful rest. During a long stretch of isolation, it may be a reliable visit. During an absorbing project, it may be the freedom to continue without repeatedly asking where the hours have gone.

A single slogan about novelty cannot do all of that work.

The year is not on trial

There is another way the title of this book can mislead. It might sound as if last year ought to feel far away. Perhaps a well-lived year should create a long inner distance, an impressive stretch of remembered territory.

Why should it?

A good event can remain close because you often return to it. A hard event can feel remote after your circumstances change. A familiar person can make an old scene feel near. The felt distance to an event, the apparent length of a period, and the amount you can recall are different features of your relation to the past. They need not all move in the direction you expect.

Suppose your friend sends the photograph and you spend ten minutes remembering the meal. You recall who arrived late, which story led to the extra dish, and why nobody wanted to move to a more stable table. The year has not gained any days. You have gained access to part of it.

That may be enough for this occasion. You do not have to convert the ten minutes into a theory about whether the year was sufficiently rich.

Other occasions ask more of you. If your weeks have become a sequence of duties with no room for what you value, it would be unkind to explain the problem away as a trick of memory. There may be a real shortage of time, money, help or freedom. Better recall cannot make an unfair burden fair. A person who has no control over a work schedule needs more than advice to notice the color of the sky on the way home.

We can care about the sky and the schedule. We can refuse to let one become an excuse for neglecting the other.

This is why the question of remembered time reaches beyond private mental technique. Other people help shape our days. They make demands, keep promises, interrupt us, offer company, take over a task, or fail to arrive before four. The conditions of an ordinary week can make participation easier or harder. Some changes must be negotiated. Some require support. Some are unavailable for now.

An honest account of time leaves those facts in the picture.

It also leaves room for a person who is content with a quiet life. You may love a familiar route, the same room, the same evening meal. You may have no desire to make the calendar more adventurous. A book about memory should help you examine that life, not replace your preferences with an author’s taste for novelty.

The first useful move is therefore a small one. When the thought “Where did the time go?” appears, let it become a more exact question. Was the day unpleasantly slow? Did the week feel rushed? Is the year difficult to recall? Does one event feel too close for its date? Have you been unable to do something that matters?

Do not answer all of them at once. One may be enough.

Once the question becomes clearer, the feeling loses some of its authority as a general verdict. You can respect it without obeying every conclusion it suggests. You can decide whether to change a condition, recover a memory, make a plan, or simply acknowledge the surprise of finding yourself further along in life.

The calendar will keep moving. We are not going to defeat that fact with better habits. We can, however, become more careful about what we ask of a day and more generous about what counts as having lived one.

Sources and notes