Time

Like most other septuagenarians I suppose, I wonder why it is that time has to speed up as it brings us closer to the terminus that we would just as soon never reach. That is the way it seems to work, at any rate. If life is a banquet, we must needs be force fed desert, swallowing it without tasting it. But why?

Like Minniver Cheevy, I thought and thought — and thought about this. Fruitlessly.

Then one day I happened to look at the plump single volume edition of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, which I read, no jazz, and in French. The cover is stained from prolonged contact with my hands. I can remember the day I bought it, at Schoenhof’s now-no-more foreign bookstore, like it was yesterday. I remember the are-you-shitting-me? look on the face of the young man working the cash register as he put down his Asterix comic book to ring up my ponderous purchase. And I remember asking myself Am-I-shitting-me? as I left the bookstore with five pounds of culture under one arm.

It seems like yesterday that I bought the book. But I needed more than one day to read the book to the end. Or I somehow jammed a whole lot of time between today and the it-seems-like-yesterday when I bought the book. In that apparently no more than 24 hours, Swann had enough time to debase himself before that floozy Odette, and Baron Charlus had to time become inscrutably unpleasant, and Bergotte had time to get sick and then die while admiring a little patch of yellow in a painting by Vermeer, and Vinteuil the composer of that unforgettable air had time to have his heart break when he discovered that his daughter is lesbian and so what?

So maybe we stuff a lot of time into the interstices between the points of time that we remember like they were yesterday. So maybe I’ll see if there’s enough time in those interstices for me to re-read that book, this time in English. I kind of want to find out what happens.