How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

She is smiling at me. It is a wistful smile. The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty. The kind that contains sadness and defiance and amusement all at once.

‘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.

the point is: history is everywhere. It’s about making people realise that. It makes you understand a place.’

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. To be actually here.

Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows.

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

To exist when the point of you has gone.

‘There is a darkness that fringes everything. It is a most horrid ecstasy.’ And I felt the horror of her horror. That, I suppose, is a price we pay for love: the

The cottages and stables and barns and pond and fruit orchards are long gone. I know it isn’t healthy to walk around no longer familiar streets, looking for memories that have been paved over, but I need to see it.

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. 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. And the news stopped being new. The very word ‘news’ became a joke. It was all just a cycle. A slowly rotating downward one. And your tolerance for human beings, making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again, began to fade. It was like being stuck in the same song, with a chorus you had once liked but now made you want to rip your ears off.

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.

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

London was too much for me. Too many memories. Too many ghosts. It was time to be someone else again. I suppose the way I understand my life is as a kind of Russian doll, with different versions inside other versions, each one enclosing the other, whereby the life before isn’t seen from the outside but is still there.

it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves.

Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. 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.

But there is a part of me – a small but dangerous part – that is keen to know where she knew me from. Or, maybe, a small part that simply wants to be solved.

Music doesn’t get in. 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.

Because an anchor fixes you in one place. And I am still not fixed. Could I just keep sailing through life for ever feeling like this? A boat has to stop eventually. It has to reach a port, a harbour, a destination, known or unknown. It has to get somewhere, and stop there, or what is the point of the boat? 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 was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad. I was both on the right and wrong side of history. I had, in short, lost myself.

I stop looking at her, and wait for her to go away. Which she does. I feel her anger. And I feel guilty. Actually, no, it isn’t just that. There is something else. A kind of homesickness, a longing for something – a feeling – I haven’t known for a very long time. And when she goes and sits down on the other side of the staff room, she doesn’t smile, or look at me, and I feel like something is over before it has a chance to begin.

The reason I have been avoiding it is because this is where I first met Rose. My ventures to Chapel Street and Well Street had been too painful. But I need to get over her. I need to get over everything. 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. And that is the point I want to reach.

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.

Anton steals a glance back at me and I smile and confuse him more. I understand. The way you can get caught up in things, find yourself floating, heading towards trouble you can hardly avoid.

‘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.’

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.

She gave me peace just by looking at her, which might explain why I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people any more. I wanted her in every sense. To want is to lack. That is what it means.

‘Is this your Tom?’ Your Tom. It felt embarrassingly good. To know Rose had spoken of me. To feel as if I belonged to her. It made me feel solid, real, as if the space I occupied was meant to be occupied by me.

I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised they – the terror, the love – were one and the same thing.

remember how it feels, that dizzy spinning fusion of love and terror.

as you get older, Anton, you realise that you never get away with things. The human mind has its own. . . prisons. You don’t have a choice over everything in life.’

every present moment is paying for a future one.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

It was the perfect time for me, where friendships and relationships were expected to be intense and burn out in fast gin-soaked debauchery. The Roaring Twenties.

‘Have you been reading Mr Freud?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, don’t. It will make you feel worse. Apparently we are not in control of ourselves. We are ruled by the unconscious parts of our psyche. The only truth we can hope to find about ourselves is in our dreams. He says that most people don’t want to be free. Because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.’

I played the piano every night and made the most superficial acquaintances with poets and painters and artists that often only lasted a night.

Alcohol became more than just alcohol. It felt like freedom. Drinking wine and cognac was almost a moral duty. And I drank and drank and drank, until I almost convinced myself I was happy.

And I feel a brief but intense surge of desire. I haven’t truly lusted after another human being for centuries, but when I look at Camille, when I hear her kind, strong voice, when I see the delicate creases around her eyes, when I feel the skin of her hand against the skin of mine, when I look at her mouth, my mind switches to what it would be like to be with her, to lose my way with her, to whisper longings into her ear, to devour and be devoured.

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

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.

She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.

Her laughter fades. I want to kiss her. I don’t know how to make that happen. I have been single for four centuries and have absolutely no idea of the etiquette. But I feel light, happy. Actually, I would be fine with this. This ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ moment. With a kiss forever a possibility. With her looking at me and me looking at her.

I realise I would like to solve the mystery of her just as much as she wants to solve the mystery of me and she nestles a little into me and I put my arm around her. Right there. On the park bench. Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.

I pick it up and turn to a random page and read a sentence – ‘Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it’ – and I begin to feel the onset of potential tears.

it was an easy place to disappear into. A town of seafarers, ragamuffins, criminals, runaways, drifters, musicians, artists, dreamers, loners, and I was, at various points, any and all of those things.

Or is this something different? Maybe this is a different kind of love. Did it matter?

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

I was already feeling a kind of homesickness for a present I was still living. And I lay there, trying to find a route to a far distant future, where things might be better. Where somehow the course of my life had re-routed and headed homewards once more.

In the dark he almost looks his age. Stooped and thin and withered, like a Giacometti sculpture in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt.

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?