How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people is off limits. Do you hear me? Don’t attach yourself to people, and try to feel as little as you possibly can for those you do meet. Because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind . . .’

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.

‘History isn’t something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history. History isn’t politicians or kings and queens. History is everyone. It is everything. It’s that coffee. You could explain much of the whole history of capitalism and empire and slavery just by talking about coffee.

history is everywhere. It’s about making people realise that.

‘It’s just making them realise that everything they say and do and see is only what they say and do and see because of what has gone before.

The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future.

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?

But this is how I remember these things, and 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.

There were many times I had lost all hope in my search. A search not just for a lost person, but for that other thing I had lost – meaning. For a point. It occurred to me that human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it.

It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.

‘Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end.

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

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

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.

I need to tame the past. That is what history is, the teaching and telling of it. It is a way to control it and order it. To turn it into a pet. But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can’t be tamed.

all that living alone in Iceland had done was make me want an ordinary life. But an ordinary life is not a guarantee of happiness.

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 believed in witches because it made things easier. People don’t just need an enemy, they need an explanation.

The first technology to lead to fake news wasn’t the internet, it was the printing press.

People only see what they have decided to see.

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

Sometimes change is for the better, and sometimes change isn’t for the better. Modern toilets with a flush are definitely a change for the better. Self-service checkouts are definitely not. Sometimes things are a change for the better and the worse at the same time, like the internet.

he told me the secret to managing the tightrope. He said people were wrong when they said the secret was to relax and to forget about the drop below you. The secret was the opposite. The secret was never to relax. The secret was never to believe you are good. Never to forget about the drop.

Skyscrapers I Like The way That when you Tilt Poems On their side They Look like Miniature Cities From A long way Away. Skyscrapers Made out Of Words.

You need to learn the art of discretion. Of speaking about a thing without actually speaking of it. Truth is a straight line you sometimes need to curve,

‘You have lived a long time. You must know by now that it is not just ourselves we endanger when our truth begins to surface.’

‘Ignorance changes over time. But it is always there, and it remains just as lethal.

I looked at the New York skyline and felt like the world was dreaming bigger. Clearing its throat. Getting some confidence.

There was something about New York in the 1890s. Something exciting. Something so real you felt you could breathe it in. Something that made me feel again.

‘We are different, Tom,’ he said eventually. ‘We are not other people. We carry the past with us. We see it everywhere. And sometimes that can be dangerous, and we need to help each other.’ His hand was now on my shoulder, as if he was telling me something of the deepest importance. ‘The past is never gone. It just hides.’

‘This is a war, Tom. It is an unseen war, but it is a war. We have to protect ourselves.’

‘Life is life. So long as I can hear music and so long as I can still enjoy oysters and champagne . . .’

But I am good with pain. Small price to pay for being alive. ‘Life is the ultimate privilege, so I am among the most privileged people on the planet.

Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up.

That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.

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.

I need ‘closure’ as people say these days. Though you can never close the past. The most you can do with it is accept it.

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.

I wanted to run away from this feeling of terror and loss inside me, of infinite loneliness, but of course there was no running away from that.

‘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 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?’

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.

It was the only time the bear ever seemed alive, when it was fighting off death. And I would often think of that bear, and that pointless will to survive, through whatever kind of cruelty and pain life chose to throw in his direction.

‘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?’

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

‘A kiss,’ she said, ‘is like music. It stops time . . .

If you feel for someone, just one single kiss can stop the sparrows, they say.

‘Your life will be too colourful for a dull market girl.’ ‘You are not dull, Rose.’ ‘A blade of grass is not dull until you see a flower.’ ‘It is. A blade of grass is always dull. You are not a blade of grass.’