How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

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?

I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It’s a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.

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.

human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean. You kind of ran out. There wasn’t enough self to keep going. You grew too bored of your own mind. Of the way life repeated itself. How, after a while, there wasn’t a smile or gesture that you hadn’t seen before. There wasn’t a change in the world order that didn’t echo other changes in the world order.

If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.

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

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.

Other animals don’t have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn’t progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.

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

the main lesson of history is: humans don’t learn from history.

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

Incessant apologising is never an attractive trait.

sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.

Montaigne teaches us About fear? ‘“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. And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?

I could

the process was not knowing the answer, and being fine with that.

The known has gone and the unknown awaits – the story ends and the story begins, over and over, as we dangle eternally in the present.

You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.

shoulder, when she was ten years old, that night in the coach. That had

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

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.

‘Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.’

Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.

the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it.

A book only becomes real by being read, so thank you for giving my daydream a reality.