How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

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.

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. To be actually here.

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?

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

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.

I don’t know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren’t. 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. Though I am absolutely sure, word for word, she then said: ‘There is a darkness that fringes everything.

It is depressing to feel your life erased.

It occurred to me that 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.

And when I felt nothing I almost became nostalgic for the grief; at least when you felt pain you knew you were still alive. I had tried to fight this, forcing myself into life and noise.

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.

People only see what they have decided to see.

But there is never a way into the before. All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.

I feel the most familiar feeling of all: that I am living in the wrong time.

I’ve ridden a bike now for a hundred years and I think they are one of the truly great human inventions.

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

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 should know that by now.

‘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.’

Music is already in. 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. A rebirth of sorts.

‘Are you someone who watches life, or someone who participates?’

I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body.

There is something else. A kind of homesickness, a longing for something – a feeling – I haven’t known for a very long time.

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.

After reading the news, I go on Twitter. I don’t have an account but I find it interesting – all the different voices, the squabbles, the arrogance of certainty, the ignorance, the occasional, but wonderful, compassion, and watching the evolution of language head towards a new kind of hieroglyphics.

‘Music is about time,’ I told her. ‘It is about controlling time.’

For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.

‘You can’t choose where you are born, you can’t decide who won’t leave you, you can’t choose much. A life has unchangeable tides the same as history does. But there is still room inside it for choice. For decisions.’ ‘I suppose.’

A quietness, on stage and off it, as though he was absorbing the world rather than projecting it.

That is why I write. I am just for ever running from madness.’

‘You possess a young face and a wise tongue. People hate that. They know it could fool them.’

It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you.

I had taught myself piano. That is what I had done with the last eight years.

Other times, when Marion was asleep, Rose would just burst out crying for no apparent reason, and ask me to hold her, which I did. Often, when I came back from a night playing music, I would hear her tears as I entered the door.

The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment. And what starts as a doubt in a mind can swiftly become an act in the world.

Yet we still thought it important for her to read, to be able to broaden her mind and give her places in her thoughts to hide inside. Reading was a rare skill, in those days, but was one I possessed.

‘If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.’

I can’t really remember feeling pride.

nous allons parler plus tard

‘Prétendez que je ne suis pas ici,’

‘All right, Hendrich. I’ll do it.’

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.

My mind is racing to understand. This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself.

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.

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.

‘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.’

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

Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself. I am working on that. Reading, painting, playing the piano. Shooting nine-hundred-year-old men.’

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.