How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

‘Music is about time,’ I told her. ‘It is about controlling time.’ When she stopped playing, she looked thoughtful for a moment and said something like, ‘I sometimes want to stop time. I sometimes want, in a happy moment, for a church bell never to ring again. I want not to ever have to go to the market again. I want for the starlings to stop flying in the sky . . . But we are all at the mercy of time. We are all the strings, aren’t we?’ She definitely said that last bit: We are all the strings.

Superstition was rising everywhere. People like, occasionally, to see human life as a generally smooth upwardly sloping line towards enlightenment and knowledge and tolerance, but I have to say that has never been my experience.

‘Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.’

I was already feeling a kind of homesickness for a present I was still living.

Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don’t expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.