Читать книгу On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast - Catherine Blyth, Catherine Blyth - Страница 16

Time holds us captive to paradoxes. We imagine that life is heading in one direction, yet the instant we enter the present, off time scutters into the past. Our minds grope for the future, yet our hopes are forged on the anvil of yesterday. In his closing words, The Great Gatsby’s narrator mourns the stale dream for which his friend lost his life: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

Nothing can reverse time’s direction of travel. In his embarrassed memoir of serving as a German soldier in the Second World War, Günter Grass reflects on the gravitational pull of our past: ‘After is always before. What we call the present, this fleeting nownownow, is constantly overshadowed by a past now in such a way that the escape route known as the future can be marched to only in lead-soled shoes.’ By contrast, in 1940, German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing shortly before he swallowed a handful of morphine pills in preference to expulsion from Spain into Nazi hands, saw history as an angel blasted into the future, for ever looking back:

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet … The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Yet we can dart through time’s rubble to find solace and answers, as Machiavelli did in 1513, after the Medici tortured and then exiled him to his farm, to revive in the company of ghosts.

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.

The licence of mental time travel – adventures with other minds, ways of being and thinking – lets us surpass ourselves. This was demonstrated amply by Michel de Montaigne, a sweet-tempered landowner, so-so city mayor and middling winemaker, who thwarted his native idleness to invent a new artform. His Essays, published in 1580 and still in print, offered wisdom truffled indiscriminately from fields, friends and the larder of antiquity. This came naturally: he was a man out of his time, something of a living fossil, like the coelacanth (a fish rediscovered sixty-six million years after it was supposed to have been extinct) – stuffed to the gills with classical learning because his eccentric father decreed that he should only hear, think and speak in Latin from the age of three. (Neatly closing the door on the possibility of an intimate relationship with his testy mother, not to mention his father, who spoke no Latin at all.)

Montaigne grew into an adult fascinated with but detached from life, acutely conscious that his world was no less bizarre or ephemeral than that of the ancient Romans he knew so intimately. Not surprisingly, he became adept at gambits of mental time travel, reporting gleefully how once he used them to relieve a fresh-minted widow’s grief by tiptoeing conversational manoeuvres – ‘gently deflecting our talk and diverting it bit by bit to subjects nearby, then a little more remote’. To ward off depression at his impending death he summoned memories of youth to ‘sidestep and avert my gaze from this stormy and cloudy sky that I have in front of me’.

Artful mental manoeuvres can change the future. Great Britain’s Hollie Webb was twenty-five years old and one of her team’s youngest players when she approached the goal to take the deciding penalty in the 2016 Olympics’ women’s hockey final. A single strike to win Britain’s first gold in this event, or lose it. Few actions lasting under a second have such weight upon them. Webb looked, swiped … smack! Smack again as the ball rang off the back of the goal. ‘I watched it go into the net and then I can’t remember anything else since then. We practise them so many times and I just tried to imagine I was training at Bisham Abbey. I knew what I was going to do against their keeper, so I just stared her in the eye.’

Betraying no fear, giving away no clue as to where she would aim, was important, but more so was that Webb reduced the time’s pressure, conceiving of the shot as simply the latest in a sweaty queue of such moments. Telling herself she was doing something ordinary allowed her to be extraordinary.

If mental time travel offers a refuge from the present, it can also draw life from the past. David Alliance left school in Tehran at thirteen to toil in the Grand Bazaar, then landed in Manchester in 1950 with £14 and a dream of starting a business. He was to create the largest textile company in the West. As age dimmed him, he developed a technique to reinvigorate himself that might have been whispered by Montaigne’s ghost:

When I was exhausted after a long day of doing business, I would close my eyes and become a little boy again in Kashan: the sun beat down on the courtyard of our family house and the ground was too hot for my bare feet. I could smell the dry desert air and feel the warmth of the sun, a sensation so real that sometimes it brought sweat to my brow. My father and sisters were there, and there was love and laughter and security. When I opened my eyes, I would find myself back in an office in Manchester, but refreshed and full of energy, ready to get on with the task at hand. I did this even in board meetings and no one in the room ever guessed the journey I had just been on, or understood how I could recover my energies so rapidly … sometimes, when I cannot sleep, I take a virtual walk through the bazaar, past my father’s office and on through the cool alleyways, remembering happy times there. And then I’m relaxed again.