589 The Sedartis Effect

Sedartis is full of little insights which are borderline annoying. They are annoying, because they are obvious and it’s possible only to be borderline annoyed with them, because they are obviously true. They are the kind of insights that make you wonder: why has nobody pointed this out to me, in, say, year eleven. (Before then it would have maybe seemed a little abstract.)

Since joining me – unbidden, uninvited – and taking up quasi-permanent residence by my side, he has been doing this at irregular intervals, which at least has the advantage that there is still a mild element of surprise.

‘The reason time passes faster as you get older, relentlessly, irreversibly, is very simple,’ he tells me. I did not ask him about this, I was just looking out of the window of yet another moving train, this time to Dorset, via Crewkerne, Somerset.

‘I imagine it is,’ I say, having for some time felt I had my own plausible theory about this, but not found opportunity or reason to formulate it. ‘At the age of one, one year is a hundred percent of your lifetime. That makes it really long. So long that you can’t fathom it.

By the age of ten, that same year is now only a tenth of your lifetime. In absolute terms, it may be as long as any other year, but you don’t experience life in absolute terms: you experience life in relative terms, always; relative in its entirety to you, in parts also to others. Your year now makes up just ten percent of the body of your experience thus far.

At the age of fifty, one year has shrunk to a fiftieth of your lifetime: if somebody offered you a fiftieth part of a pie you’d barely think it worth eating. But it’s still a year, and it’s still a part of the pie of your life. And you never know, you may just find a cherry in it.

And aged a hundred, your year now hardly registers. You may well lose track and forget how old you are: was it a hundred and two or a hundred and three years ago now that you were born? Does it matter?’

‘That all makes perfect sense to me,’ I say to Sedartis, who I think is in danger of seeming smug. ‘Why are you telling me this? Now?’

‘Because you’re obviously at that moment in your life when your perception of time reaches a tipping point: your life expectancy today isn’t quite but may soon be a hundred; so around now, as you’re halfway through this, your sense that you’re losing your grip on time will accelerate; and because you’re now primarily no longer moving away from your birth, which is fixed and lies finite in the past, but towards your death, which is undetermined and reaches into an indefinite future, you will find this more and more disconcerting.’

‘What, more disconcerting than I find it already?’

‘Of course: it is, in a not entirely obvious way, not entirely unlike the Doppler Effect: the sound waves coming towards you are compressed so they appear to your ears higher than once the source of the sound has passed: now the waves are getting stretched out and so the pitch for you seems to drop. Of course, time is not a wave and the comparison is unscientific at best and clumsy at worst, but if nothing else it’s a fine example of how our reality is shaped mostly by our own experience of it.’

‘Quite.’

‘But think not for one moment that you’d be happier if you lived longer.’

‘I don’t think so, generally.’

‘Because: if we were to get to the point, say, where we habitually had an active consciousness span of ten thousand years, it would not feel that much longer than our consciousness span feels to us today: as we’d get towards the last millennium, each year would only constitute between a nine and a ten thousandth of our lifetime. That is about the same as three days are to us today. We would simply think of a year then as we think of a weekend now and stretch our living out over a period a hundred times longer. And nor should this surprise us: when our life expectancy was thirty years or so, people did not think to themselves, our lives are way too short; they simply did all their living inside those thirty years at their disposal. No-one could argue that Alexander the Great, for example, or Mozart, didn’t really get enough living done in the thirty-odd years of their experience as human beings.’

‘No,’ I say, more than a tad wistfully thinking of Tom Lehrer, ‘that, I’m sure, no-one could argue.’