Just after Christmas, I was walking along a footpath near our home with my son and my grandchildren. The children were riding their scooters. It was late afternoon, really twilight, and darkness was beginning to encroach on the landscape.
We met an elderly man walking his dog in the opposite direction. He stopped to watch the children playing for a moment, then spoke to us. He said he had just spent a few days with his daughter, now forty-seven, whom he had not seen for a long time. He shook his head slightly and said, isn’t it strange how time flies? He told us he was now in his seventies, and that it felt like only a moment since she had been a small girl. And now, suddenly, she was a middle-aged woman.
We agreed, in the polite way people do, that time does indeed pass very quickly. He then continued on his way with his dog.
My son turned to me and said: So tell me, how does time look to you? Does your whole life now seem as if it’s gone by in a flash?
I stopped and thought about it. It seemed a more complicated question than it first appeared. I hesitated. The children circled, impatient to move on. We continued walking, diverted; I never gave him an answer at the time.
So what does my life actually look like, viewed from 75? Two observations come to mind.
The first is that I do have quite detailed memories of early childhood, of being very young, not much older than my grandchildren are now. I also have vivid memories of myself as a teenager, though they are episodic rather than continuous, and of my early twenties. But all of this lies fifty to sixty years in the past. The person I was then, now feels to me almost like a stranger, no more immediately accessible to me than any young person I might pass in the street. The memories exist, but I don't inhabit that earlier self.
The second observation concerns how time works for me now. In this respect, I do not think I am very different from someone at any age. I experience myself as present within a narrow temporal window: a sense of continuity extending back a few hours, perhaps not as far as a full day, and forward a few hours into anticipation. This limited span is what gives coherence to what I am doing and perceiving. Beyond that, whether into the past or the future, I have to consult external records: a diary, a calendar, photographs, documents. Those longer stretches of time don't form a unified totality in my mind.
It is as though I am walking along a very long, dark road with a small torch. The beam illuminates only my immediate surroundings. It gestures vaguely toward the darkness ahead and allows some reconstruction of the darkness behind, but I do not live in either of those regions. I live only in the illuminated patch, in the extended present.
Had I been able to formulate it at the time, that is what I would have said to my son.
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