Time Does Not Walk in Line
時は一直線に歩まない
The clock on my wall measures time, yet it has never once told me what time is.
It divides the day into identical coins, each minute stamped the same, each hour and cold.
But the time I actually live refuses this tidy currency, swelling and shrinking without the slightest regard for clocks.
An afternoon of dread can last a bleak eternity, while a year of happiness collapses into a single afternoon.
Clock time is a line; lived time is a tide, and no tide ever moves in a straight line.
The philosophers named this inner tide , the felt thickness of a present that will not lie flat.
cannot be counted, only undergone, the way a melody is heard and never merely added up.
A tune is not the sum of its separate notes but the flowing in which each note holds the others.
So too a life is not a heap of dated instants but a movement in which all its moments .
In deep memory, dissolves, and events that stood years apart suddenly touch, cheek to astonished cheek.
My mother's death and my first day of school now lie side by side, though decades once divided them.
The mind is not a filing cabinet where each moment waits, dated and obedient, in its labelled drawer.
It is a pool in which the past keeps rising, uninvited, to trouble and enrich the trembling surface.
We imagine time as a river bearing us onward, always forward, never permitting us to swim upstream.
Yet in a single instant of the whole river can reverse, or pool, or run in two directions at once.
This , in which many times coexist, is the native country of memory and of dreams alike.
The calendar insists that yesterday is gone, sealed and unreachable, filed forever behind today's fresh page.
Experience knows better, for yesterday leans constantly over my shoulder, whispering into everything I take to be now.
There is no pure present; each moment arrives already thickened with the of all that came before.
To be conscious at all is to carry one's whole history, invisibly, into the narrow doorway of the instant.
and , lived time stretches around joy and contracts around routine, obeying feeling rather than the clock.
The happiest hours leave the shortest measurable trace yet the longest shadow in the chambers of the heart.
This is why an old man may feel that his childhood was both a moment ago and a thousand years gone.
I am seventy by the calendar, yet inwardly I am every age I have ever been, all at once.
The self is not a point advancing along a line but a chord in which many notes still sound.
To understand a life, then, one must abandon the ruler and learn instead to listen for its rhythm.
The clock will keep its steady, count, faithful to a time that no one has ever felt.
I set it aside tonight and follow, instead, the stranger and truer time that memory keeps within me.