How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

One of the reasons people don’t know about us is that most people aren’t prepared to believe it. Human beings, as a rule, simply don’t accept things that don’t fit their worldview.

it didn’t really matter how many years or decades or centuries had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.

Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?

all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

‘Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that – and we shall – there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

I had to exist, I realised, because for pain to be felt there must be a living presence – a me – to feel it. And there was a reassurance in that knowledge, that proof of my own reality.

Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

People only see what they have decided to see.

And a life is like that. There’s no need to fear change, or necessarily welcome it, not when you don’t have anything to lose. Change is just what life is. It is the only constant I know.

But there is a part of me – a small but dangerous part – that is keen to know where she knew me from. Or, maybe, a small part that simply wants to be solved.

The progress of humanity seemed to be measured in the distance we placed between ourselves and nature.

Such a sadness to that word, don’t you think? Legacy. What a meaningless thing. All that work for a future in which they don’t appear.

Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.

People’s minds across the world were filling with utopias that could never overlap.

To want is to lack. That is what it means.

I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised they – the terror, the love – were one and the same thing.

as was so often the case with anger, it was really just fear projecting outwards.

It was the age of noise, and so suddenly playing music had a new importance. It made you a master of the world. Amid the accidental cacophony of modern life to be able to play music, to make sense out of noise, could briefly make you a kind of god. A creator. An orderer. A comfort giver.

We weren’t there to take over, we were there, in our own minds, to discover. And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.

It is a popular modern idea. That the inner us is something different to the outer us. That there is an authentic realer and better and richer version of ourselves which we can only tap into by buying a solution. This idea that we are separate from our nature,

‘Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it’

That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.’

We are mysteries to ourselves.

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”’

There is a world in which he lives and there is a world in which he is dead. And the move between the two happens with no greater ricochet than the whisper of waves crashing onto distant rocks.

‘“I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.”’

I like this job. I can’t right now think of a better purpose in life than to be a teacher. To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it.

Those who cannot remember the past, observed the philosopher George Santayana in 1905, are condemned to repeat it.

That is the nature of things. History was – is – a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

I keep staring between the trees at the air that had been inhabited by the deer and realise it is true. The deer isn’t there, but I know it had been there and so the space is different than it would otherwise have been. The memory made it different.