How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

I often think of what Hendrich said to me, over a century ago, in his New York apartment. ‘The first rule is that you don’t fall in love,’ he said. ‘There are other rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. If you stick to this you will just about be okay.’

‘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. The amount of blood and misery that has taken place for us to sit here and sip coffee out of paper cups is incredible.’

‘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. Because of Shakespeare. Because of every human who ever lived.’

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?

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.

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.

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

For years after Rose died, I would often catch myself in apothecaries, contemplating a purchase of arsenic. And recently I was back in that state. Standing on bridges, dreaming of non-existence.

I just didn’t like my condition. 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.

The past stays and echoes even as modernity roars ahead.

Other animals don’t have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn’t progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons.

So here I am, with my head full of human fears and pains, my chest tight with anxiety, thinking about how much future I have in front of me.

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

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

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

This is what the rich do. Once they know they can survive comfortably and their children can survive comfortably they set about working on their legacy. Such a sadness to that word, don’t you think? Legacy. What a meaningless thing. All that work for a future in which they don’t appear.

No. Not got in. That’s the wrong way of putting it. 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. A rebirth of sorts.

There is a tree in California, a Great Basin bristlecone pine that was found, after an intensive ring count, to be five thousand and sixty-five years old.

In recent years, whenever I have despaired of my condition and needed to feel a bit more mortal and ordinary, I think of that tree in California. It has been alive since the Pharaohs. It has been alive since the founding of Troy. Since the start of the Bronze Age. Since the start of yoga. Since mammoths. And it has stayed there, calmly in its spot, growing slowly, producing leaves, losing leaves, producing more, as those mammoths became extinct, as Homer wrote The Odyssey, as Cleopatra reigned, as Jesus was nailed to a cross, as Siddhārtha Gautama left his palace to weep for his suffering subjects, as the Roman Empire declined and fell, as Carthage was captured, as water buffalo were domesticated in China, as the Incas built cities, as I leaned over the well with Rose, as America fought with itself, as world wars happened, as Facebook was invented, as millions of humans and other animals lived and fought and procreated and went, bewildered, to their fast graves, the tree had always been the tree. That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.

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.

My head pulses with a pain even stronger than I’d had in the class earlier, and for a moment, in a lull between the sound of cars, I feel it, I feel the living history of the road, the residue of my own pain lingering in the air, and I feel as weak as I did in 1599, when I was still heading west, delirious and ready to be saved.

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.

And the sun shone through the window and lit her face and strands of her brown hair turned gold, and for the first time in four days my soul – or what I used to consider my soul – for the smallest sliver of a moment felt something other than insufferable torment.

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.

For years now I had convinced myself that the sadness of the memories weighed more and lasted longer than the moments of happiness themselves. So I had, through some crude emotional mathematics, decided it was better not to seek out love or companionship or even friendship. To be a little island in the alba archipelago, detached from humanity’s continent, instead. Hendrich was right, I believed. It was best not to fall in love. But recently, now, I was starting to feel that you couldn’t do mathematics with emotions. In protecting yourself from hurt you could create a new, subtler type of pain. It is a dilemma. And not one I am going to solve tonight.

And the first thing I discovered about freedom was that it smelled of shit.

As with much of the popular music throughout history, ‘Greensleeves’ was a wildly inappropriate tune for a child to know. I wasn’t that worldly wise at that time but I was wise enough to know that Lady Greensleeves was the standard insult du jour for promiscuous women. Her sleeves were green because of all that outdoor sex she was supposedly having.

I'm sorry, WHAT?!

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

‘A kiss,’ she said, ‘is like music. It stops time . . . I had a romance once,’ she said simply. ‘One summer. He worked in the orchard. We kissed and did merry things together but I never really felt for him. If you feel for someone, just one single kiss can stop the sparrows, they say. Do you think that can happen?’

‘The thing I want to get across, though, is that Shakespeare was a person. I mean, he lived. He was a man. He was an actual man. Not just a writer, but a businessman, a networker, a producer. A man who walked real streets in real rain and drank ale and ate real oysters. A man who wore an earring and smoked and breathed and slept and went to the toilet. A man with hands and feet and bad breath.’

Shakespeare frowned at his friend as if he were a headache. ‘You ale-soused old apple.’

‘And you are not a stayer, Tom. You ran from France. And you ran from Suffolk. You will run from here. You do not settle. Since we kissed even your eyes fear settling on mine.’

‘My clothes are just rags with dreams.’ ‘You may be better without them, then.’ ‘Dreams?’ ‘No.’

But 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.’

‘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.’

Zelda offered me a cigarette, which I accepted (I was smoking now – everyone was smoking now), and then placed one in Scott’s mouth, and another in her own. A kind of wild despair flared suddenly in her eyes as she struck the match. ‘Grow up or crack up,’ she said, after the first inhale. ‘The divine choices we have

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. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.

The past resides inside the present, repeating, hiccupping, reminding you of all the stuff that no longer is

L’enfer, c’est les autres.’ ‘Sartre?’

‘Life is always mysterious,’ she says. ‘But some mysteries are bigger than others.’

I had breathed the same air as Shakespeare, and now I was breathing the same air as Chaplin. How could I be ungrateful?

‘I keep having nightmares.’ ‘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.’

She told me that, as you get older, somewhere around the mid-millennium mark, albas develop a deep insight. ‘What kind of insight?’ ‘It’s incredible. Like a third eye. The feeling for time becomes so profound that inside a single moment you can see everything. You can see the past and the future. It is as though everything stops and, for just that moment, you know how everything is going to be.’ ‘And is that good? It sounds horrifying.’ ‘It’s not good or horrifying. It just is. It’s just an incredibly powerful feeling, neither good or bad, where everything becomes clear.’

It seemed, in the 1930s, that the whole course of humanity was at stake. As it very often does today. Too many people wanted to find an easy answer to complicated questions. It was a dangerous time to be human. To feel or to think or to care.

I worried that Marion would face the same problems – or even worse ones – for I knew (of course I knew) that women were the ones who had to die at the bottom of rivers to prove their innocence.

Superstition was rising everywhere. People like, occasionally, to see human life as a generally smooth upwardly sloping line towards enlightenment and knowledge and tolerance, but I have to say that has never been my experience. It isn’t in this century and it wasn’t in that one. The arrival of King James onto the throne let superstition off the lead. King James, who not only wrote Daemonologie but also asked puritanical translators to refashion the Bible, was a boost for intolerance. 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. And so our fears grew.

We never went to the Globe to see Macbeth, for obvious reasons, but it was no coincidence that this tale of politics and supernatural malevolence was the most popular and talked-about piece of entertainment at the time.

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