The Time Keeper

by Mitch Albom

He is listening to something. Voices. Endless voices. They rise from a pool in the corner of the cave. They are the voices of people on Earth.

Sarah Lemon is one of those voices. A teenager in our day, she sprawls on a bed and studies a photo on her cell phone: a good-looking boy with coffee-colored hair. Tonight she will see him. Tonight at eight-thirty.

Victor Delamonte is one of those voices. A wealthy man in his mid-eighties, he sits in a doctor’s office.

The doctor speaks softly. “There’s not much we can do,” he says. Months of treatment have not worked. The tumors. The kidneys.

Once, before he angered God, he was just another man, fated to die when his days were done. Now he has a different fate: Banished to this cave, he must listen to the world’s every plea—for more minutes, more hours, more years, more time.

The boy’s name is Dor. The girl is Alli.

As Alli runs, she looks back at Dor and grins. What she feels are the first stirrings of love.

Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.

Unlike the sun, which looked the same every day, the changing moon gave Dor something to count, and he gouged holes on clay tablets until he noticed a pattern. The pattern was what the Greeks would later call “months.” He assigned a stone to every full moon. He notched tablets for moons in between. He created the first calendar. And now all his days were numbered.

“Learn what you do not know,” the old man said. “Understand the consequences of counting the moments.” “How?” Dor asked. “By listening to the misery it creates.”

“It is never too late or too soon. It is when it is supposed to be.”

“You marked the minutes,” the old man said. “But did you use them wisely? To be still? To cherish? To be grateful? To lift and be lifted?”

“Remember this always: There is a reason God limits man’s days.”

As he churned through the water—unaffected by cold or fatigue—he let his mind wander through all he had seen and the people from his life to whom he had never said good-bye, people now gone for thousands of years. His father. His mother. His children. His beloved wife. Finish your journey and you will know. He wondered when that would be. He wondered what he had to learn. Mostly he wondered, as he crossed the ocean

Victor waited. It was December, a few weeks before his final Christmas, and he’d decided to buy himself a timepiece. He would have the cryonics people stop it the moment he was frozen; when he reached the new world, he would start it up again.

Sometimes, when you are not getting the love you want, giving makes you think you will.

But a man who can take anything will find most things unsatisfying. And a man without memories is just a shell.

And so, there, alone, high above the city, Father Time held the only possession he cared about, the hourglass with his story. And, once again, out loud, he recited his life: “This is when we ran up the hillside … This is the stone Alli threw … This is the day we were wed …”

life. He paid for a private suite—equipped with

“We all yearn for what we have lost. But sometimes, we forget what we have.”

“The ‘End of the World’ table in Washington Square Park.”

“I know, right? Anyhow, they say the world is going to end next week, and I have something I want to give you, so I better do it fast.”

Why does the sun go on shining? Why does the sea rush to shore? Don’t they know—it’s the end of the world ’Cause you don’t love me anymore?

Why do the birds go on singing? Why do the stars glow above? Don’t they know—it’s the end of the world? …

“The End is coming. What will you do with the time you have left?”

Every person on the planet—including Grace, Lorraine, Victor, and Sarah—will instantly stop aging. And one person will start.

But Victor was determined to control his dying the way he’d controlled his living.

Death, on paper, would come when they wrote it came. But death would never touch Victor. He would duck it. And jump a boat to the future.

Sitting high above the city, Father Time realized that knowing something and understanding it were not the same thing.

“You have not died,” he began. “You are in the middle of a moment.”

“You don’t really fix clocks, do you?” “I prefer them broken.” “Why is that?” Victor said. Dor looked at the grain of sand in his fingers. “Because I am the sinner who created them.”

Einstein once postulated that if you traveled at an enormous rate of speed, time would actually slow down relative to the world you left behind,

When we are most alone is when we embrace another’s loneliness.

But hurting ourselves to inflict pain on others is just another cry to be loved.

Time is not something you give back. The very next moment may be an answer to your prayer. To deny that is to deny the most important part of the future.” “What’s that?” “Hope.”

“With endless time, nothing is special. With no loss or sacrifice, we can’t appreciate what we have.”

He studied the teardrop. He thought back to the cave. And he knew, finally, why he had been chosen for this journey. He had lived an eternity. Victor wanted an eternity. It had taken Dor all these centuries to comprehend the last thing the old man had told him, the thing he shared with Victor now. “There is a reason God limits our days.” “Why?” “To make each one precious.”

“I lived,” Dor said, “but I was not alive.”

“All who are born are always dying.”