The Gap of Time

by Jeanette Winterson

I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What’s the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.

Forgiveness is a word like tiger—there’s footage of it and verifiably it exists but few of us have seen it close and wild or known it for what it is.

As I walked down the street carrying the baby I fell into a gap of time, where one time and another become the same time.

“Death is the least important thing in my life. What difference will it make? I won’t be here.” “I will be here,” I said. “That’s the cruelty,” she said. “If I could live my death for you I would.”

The important things happen by chance. Only the rest gets planned.

“Take my advice: don’t think about anything you don’t have to think about.”

When you had so much money that you could buy anything, everything, then you could know what Buddha and Christ knew: that worldly goods were worthless.

Reading was so quiet you could hear the pages rustle.

That was the difference between men and women, Leo thought. Men need groups and gangs and sport and clubs and institutions and women because men know that there is only nothingness and self-doubt. Women were always trying to make a connection, build a relationship. As though one human being could know another.

“If the angel tried to escape by opening his wings, then the buildings would collapse. But if the angel didn’t open his wings he would die.

what do you do,” said MiMi, “if to be free you demolish everything around you?” “But if you don’t, you die?” said Xeno. “Yes. If you don’t, you die.”

“There’s a theory,” said Xeno, “the Gnostics started it as a rival to Christianity right back at the start: this world of ours was created Fallen, not by God, who is absent, but by a Lucifer-type figure. Some kind of dark angel. We didn’t sin, or fall from grace; it wasn’t our fault. We were born this way. Everything we do is falling. Even walking is a kind of controlled falling. But that’s not the same as failing. And if we know this—gnosis—the pain is easier to bear.”

Even as Leo was saying what he said he couldn’t believe that such idiot words could come out of the idiot mouth in his idiot face when all he wanted to do was put his arms round his wife and cry until his tears made a river that would float them both away from this landlocked place.

Beyond lay the river, like possibilities, like plans, wide as life when you are young and don’t know that plans, rivers, possibilities must sooner or later empty into the ocean beyond.

“One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn’t happen to everyone.”

He had more faith in those days—these last ten years he had lost faith in his faith. The world was getting darker, not brighter. The poor were poorer, the rich were richer. People were killing each other in the name of God.

If this was the end of time then fire it right back into eternity and get it over with. He supposed that the point of time was that it would end—if it went on forever then it wouldn’t be time, would it?

And she wished that everything that had to happen had happened. That time would intervene and free them. That they could begin.

but some guy with a bomb in a backpack—how often does that happen, and to how many people? But no work, no home, no health care, no hope—that’s the everyday life of millions, billions of people. To me, that’s the threat. And climate change is the threat. And war, and drought and famine…” “OK—so we need security. A secure future.” “No! We need to be free from corporate control that runs the world for the few and ruins it for the rest of us.”

“You want a car that GOES? Anybody can buy a car that GOES—it’s almost vulgar. The DeLorean is not always a car that GOES but it is always a CAR. You know, let me tell you, when a car like this doesn’t GO—it’s really offering you a moment of Zen in a world obsessed with forward motion. Did you get your cortisol tested recently? America is running on cortisol. It’s bad for your heart, bad for your cholesterol, bad for your marriage—snappy and yappy all the time. Now, when you jump into your car—this car—and you find you can’t GO anywhere, that is a moment to ask yourself—where am I GOING?

“This is a substantial car. Once you’ve driven—and also not driven—this car—a little bit Schrödinger’s Cat, isn’t it? Alive and dead at the same time—once you have had the DeLorean experience, the rest is just unconsidered trifles.”

This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.

These nothings are nothing. But the sky is nothing, the earth is nothing, I am nothing, love is nothing, loss is nothing.

Time can’t unhappen but it can be unlost. Can it?

And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen. And the moment that looks like the rest is the one where hearts are broken or healed. And time that runs so steady and sure runs wild outside of the clocks. It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.

Maybe we won’t stay together. Maybe life is too hard anyway. Maybe love is just for the movies. Maybe we’ll hurt each other so much that we will deny that what happened happened. We’ll find an alibi to prove that we were never there. Those people didn’t exist.