How To Stop Time: A Novel

by Matt Haig

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

It was depressing that he found it so much easier to question his sanity than my reality.

The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human.

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.

‘The past is never gone. It just hides.’

I just knew it was good to be back inside the world of feeling.

‘You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don’t hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.’

‘Dreams are not to be believed. Especially the bad ones.’

I go on the BBC and Guardian websites. I read a couple of news articles about fracturing US and Chinese relations. Everyone in the comments section is predicting the apocalypse. This is the chief comfort of being four hundred and thirty-nine years old. You understand quite completely that the main lesson of history is: humans don’t learn from history. The twenty-first century could still turn out to be a bad cover version of the twentieth, but what could we do? People’s minds across the world were filling with utopias that could never overlap. It was a recipe for disaster, but, alas, a familiar one. Empathy was waning, as it often had. Peace was made of porcelain, as it always was.

‘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?’

Shakespeare was a strange actor. He was very quiet – I don’t mean in volume, I mean in mannerisms and presence. Such the opposite of a Burbage or a Kemp. There was something very un-Shakespearean about Shakespeare, especially when he was sober. A quietness, on stage and off it, as though he was absorbing the world rather than projecting it.

The past is not one separate place. It is many, many places, and they are always ready to rise into the present. One minute it is the 1590s, the next it is the 1920s. And it is all related. It is all the accumulation of time. It builds up and builds up and can catch you violently off guard at any moment. The past resides inside the present, repeating, hiccupping, reminding you of all the stuff that no longer is.

‘We are the invisible threads of history,’

I stared at the lute. At the darkness of the small holes amid the twisting decoration of the wood. I imagined, ridiculously, a world inside there. Deep in the shell of the lute. Where some miniature version of ourselves could live, safe and invisible and unharmed.

‘Philip K. Dick wrote that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.’

To talk about memories is to live them a little.

It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.

Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.

Life has a strange rhythm. It takes a while to fully be aware of this. Decades. Centuries, even. It’s not a simple rhythm. But the rhythm is there. The tempo shifts and fluctuates; there are structures within structures, patterns within patterns. It’s baffling.

Everything is happening all at once. That is one of the patterns: when nothing is happening, nothing continues to happen, but after a while the lull becomes too much and the drums need to kick in. Something has to happen. Often that need comes from yourself. You make a phone call. You say, ‘I can’t do this life any more, I need to change.’ And one thing happens that you are in control of. And then another happens which you have no say over. Newton’s third law of motion. Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen.

‘There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.’

As far as I can see, this is a problem with living in the twenty-first century. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photoshopped and filtered.

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

While knowledge without integrity is dangerous, integrity without knowledge is weak and useless.

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

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?

After all, we aren’t just who we are born. We are who we become. We are what life does to us.

Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself.

But the thing is: you cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.

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

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

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.’

It is clear. In those moments that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.