Time essay
This past week was much like any other since the pandemic began. I have a lot of control over my time and I feel very fortunate about that. While I did work a corporate job when I was much younger, it was only for a couple of years, and since then I’ve worked as a college teacher, so I have some hours when I’m teaching and have to be “on” at given times for given durations, but much of my time is self-directed. That is a special kind of luxury, and I know it and value it and I’m aware that many, many people do not share that luxury, unfortunately.
In many ways, this week, like many others since the pandemic began, has taken me back to being a 15-year-old living in the safe but dull suburbs of a major southern city. I couldn’t drive yet, there was nowhere to walk to that was interesting (just more houses), so I spent a lot of time in my room doing my own little things (playing guitar, reading, daydreaming) and being an awkward teenage boy. That was in 1982. When the pandemic hit, I could drive but there was nowhere safe to go, really. Everything felt off limits, out of bounds. So, I spent, and still do, significant amounts of time in my room at home. I have a study that is my own private space, more or less. I do my school work as a teacher now rather than as a high school student. I play guitar (including the same one I did then), read, make art, and daydream. So, in some ways I’m getting a do-over of my 16th year, but now I have a job, a spouse, and teenage children of my own, including a 15-year-old. Lynda Barry likes to ask “what time is it in your head?” This past year it’s been 1982 but also many other years all mixed together. I am simultaneously that 15-year-old and also my father back then. He worked from home then as I do now. Sometimes now I’m aware of both these roles simultaneously. I feel like that teenager and I don’t feel like I’m 53; but I have my own children doing remote schooling so my parental duties mix in strange psychic ways with my 1982 self. It doesn’t feel possible that that 15-year-old boy could have his own teenage children.
Time seems to move slowly and quickly at the same time for me. The days don’t feel long or short. Time seems to pass neither quickly nor slowly, yet all of a sudden, it’s April. I don’t feel stressed for time. I sometimes wonder if my experience of time has really been a slowing down of activity. I am by nature a quiet, contemplative person who values his alone time. I am by nature someone who thinks about the past and the future and I enjoy ruminating on aspects of time and memory. Much of this past year plus has been a radical slowing down that in many ways feels good. I think the poet Mary Oliver had it right when she wrote, “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Having many of the usual things I spent my time on gone for the time being, I have more time to slow down and pay attention and, in general, I have a renewed appreciation of these small moments. There are times when that appreciation is muddled or I lose sight of it, but that’s ok. Sometimes my backyard feels like a prison yard, and often my room feels like a monk’s cell.
Roland Barthes wrote about his experience*, in 1980 or so, looking at a photograph of one of the Lincoln assassination conspirators who was soon to be hanged for his crimes. Barthes had this sudden anguished feeling of “oh my god, he is going to die!!” But of course, that future moment contained in the photograph was actually 115 years past by the time Barthes is having this feeling. The past and the future come colliding together in a moment of time-spinning astonishment. Much of this past year, including this past week, has felt vaguely akin to this moment Barthes describes. The 15-year-old me is long gone, dead, never to return, even though the man he became is still here and writing this. Yet, what time it is in my head or in my body feels fluid and fugitive. Present and absent. I suppose this is one of the great things about being human, but also one that can be painful: our abilities to inhabit multiple time periods simultaneously, moment to moment.
* Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 1980.