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 pleaded with God, I asked and begged and bargained, but God did not bargain. God was stubborn and deaf and oblivious. And she died and I lived and a hole opened up, dark and bottomless, and I fell down and kept falling for centuries.

I take Abraham for a walk. He had spent the night eating the arm of the sofa but I don’t want to judge him. He has enough issues already.

All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.

I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life. I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body.

Well, except for a lady called Old Mrs Adams who spat at people she walked past and often shouted ‘Shit-arse’ or ‘You walking Hell turd’ at them, but people laughed it off. And that didn’t really feel like fear of the outsider so much as general hatred for everyone, which was at least a non-discriminatory attitude.

‘I am not sure I have ever met someone like you,’ I said. ‘That is good. What point would my life have, if there was a duplicate?’

‘Covered in shit,’ said little Grace, having finished her ale. ‘Sorry, Tom. Grace is her name, not a description.’ ‘Shit is a fine word,’ I said diplomatically. ‘It is quick to its point.’

I wanted her in every sense. To want is to lack. That is what it means.

‘A blade of grass is not dull until you see a flower.’

I have only been alive for four hundred and thirty-nine years, which is of course nowhere near long enough to understand the minimal facial expressions of the average teenage boy.

I loved her, instantly. Of course, most parents love their children instantly. But I mention it here because I still find it a remarkable thing. Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.

She liked music ‘made of breath not formed from fingers’.

‘a monster who meets a miracle would see a monster’.

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

The thing is, I really am quite bad, you know, with people.’ ‘Ah, them. People. Yes, it’s hard.’

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

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.

‘She’s had a bit of kidney trouble and has had a stroke so she should be off the booze completely, but she always says she’s here for a good time not a long time, though she has been here for a long time, because she’s eighty-seven and she’s a right tough old bird. Ha!’

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.

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

People you love never die.

They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters.

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

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

‘Love is a motherfucker.’ I sigh. ‘Of course it is.’ ‘You should just shoot for it. Tell her you messed up. Tell her why you messed up. Be honest. Honesty works. Well, honesty gets you locked up in a psych ward. But sometimes it works.’ ‘Honesty is a motherfucker,’ I say, and she laughs.

‘“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.”’

‘No. Are you judging me?’ ‘I’m your father. That’s what I’m here for.’ ‘I also have tattoos.’

‘I knew Shakespeare too. And met Dr Johnson. And once saw Josephine Baker dance.’ ‘Name dropper.’

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

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