Time

I just started Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time. It’s billed as a love story but so far—Kindle tells me that I’m just 13% of the way in—it seems a fuck-ton deeper than that. Maybe I’m being unfair. Love stories can be interpreted in myriad ways. They can be incisive, complicated, allegorical and enlightening OR they can simply be inspiration for muffin buffing.

Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he’s been alive for centuries. Tom has lived history–performing with Shakespeare, exploring the high seas with Captain Cook, and sharing cocktails with Fitzgerald. Now, he just wants an ordinary life.

If I could live for a thousand years, would I? If I could do it withOUT neurofibromatosis type 2, yeah maybe. If I could do it withOUT the weasel shit misogyny of our species? Quite possibly. Basically, the way to live an impossibly long life is to start out healthy, loved, white and male. Having more than a pocketful of starter moolah would help too. To live a thousand years of endless, penniless struggle would be unbearable…maybe. In the space of a thousand years, I bet I could get pretty creative with the whole business of being poor.

I’m reminded of the movie Orlando, (embarrassingly, I’ve yet to read the book).

In 1600, nobleman Orlando (Tilda Swinton) inherits his parents' house, thanks to Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp), who commands the young man to never change. After a disastrous affair with Russian princess Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey), Orlando looks for solace in the arts before being appointed ambassador to Constantinople in 1700, where war is raging. One morning, Orlando is shocked to wake up as a woman and returns home, struggling as a female to retain her property as the centuries roll by. (source)

On struggle—isn't that the very definition of life? For those of us not born to privilege, not so much. I think of Carrie Fisher though—def born and raised with major advantages—still there are no life-without-pain guarantees.

Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or think we do. It's a song we've heard.

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 think it's time to check Orlando, the book, out of the library.

And now, for some reason, this tune is happily buzzing in my bean.