Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-past one.
Tomorrow it begins again, begins ever so early, “in the fives,” as my friend Rachel would say. I will be up at 5:45, and the children will appear for breakfast shortly after 6:30. Will has been counting it down woefully for three days now: the end of our spring break.
Even now the mantel clock ticks somewhere over my left shoulder, and I am hastening to do a few Last Things: the cookies are out of the oven, my sister’s birthday card made but yet blank, thank you notes undone, and oh! the e-mails that I insisted Absolutely Would Get Written today.
Sundays are good days for writing. Sundays are Good Days– mounds of time in which I Will Not Work, even if it means I was grading papers until midnight on Saturday. Sundays are the One Day I will not allow my weekly work to infringe upon.
But the shredding and slicing will recommence tomorrow, and after a week of spring break and a thoroughly undeserved week on a cruise, this recommencing feels somehow a bit more weighty. Yes, the slicing will recommence: my day will be divided and subdivided between the hours at school and the hours at home, the time before dinner and the time after, and the subdivisions in the form of periods A, B, and C, marked punctually throughout by the ringing of the bell. It is my ignorance, no doubt, that informs me– but oh, I think it true– that no other profession is so time-conscious as that of the teacher.
Will and I looked at the calendar this evening. Only eleven more weeks left in the school year. Fewer, I think, than the weeks we enjoy free of school in the summertime, but the amount might be the same, in which case the wish that these coming weeks go quickly suddenly changes shape. Will looked at me, his eyes large: I hope, he said, that these next eleven weeks last a long time.
We say ‘a long time’ and ‘a short time,’ but only say this of past or future time. We call a past time long if it was, for example, one hundred years ago, and a future time long if it is one hundred years from now. We call a past time short if it was, say, ten days ago, and a future time short if it is ten days from now. My children were so young yesterday; my children were so young eons ago. My students are now in high school, and I try to pry moments from my memory of my high school days and can find so little. Was it, already, such a long time ago?
Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, I weigh my life by weeks and days and hours, hoping to be done one thing and starting another by a certain time, wishing always for more time, occasionally (more and more rarely) wishing time away.
Our pastor today spoke of his sons, when they were younger, coming to him and, with arms upstretched saying, “I want to hold you.” Everett used to say that, too, in his own way, with his little lisp and his full fingers curled around the edges of his ba: I hold you, he would say. I hold you. That was a long time ago.
I don’t know how to live in time without some measure of slicing and shredding, without some sense of before and now and next. Can it be done?
Who is there that would venture to tell me that there are not three tenses, past present and future, just as we learnt as boys and as we teach boys, but that there is only the present, as the other two do not exist? Or is it that the past and the future also exist, but when the present comes to be out of the future, it proceeds from something hidden, and into something hidden it returns, when from the present it becomes the past?
On the cruise last week we had very little sense of time. We got up when we wanted to, ate when we wanted to, lounged on the pool deck until we were done. We were hemmed in only by the ship’s departure time from port, and by the starting times of the many concert options on board, but these times were specific and few by comparison with the divisions of our normal days. A week ago tonight we were at sea and had tickets to hear Shawn Colvin play at eleven. We didn’t have to go if we didn’t want to.
Life is very different on land.
It is 10:51 and I am not ready for bed. The alarm will ring far too early, forcing my eyes open in a darkness I haven’t seen in two weeks. It will begin again, and my time for reflection and thoughtfulness will be wedged into narrower spaces, shreds of cognition that surface between the demands of the day. And somehow I imagine that only those shreds and narrow spaces are the times that are worthwhile, those small hours in which I am most aware of being alive. The rest of it, it seems to me, is sacrificed.
I have long burnt to meditate on your Law and confess to you my knowledge and my ignorance of it, the beginnings of your enlightenment and the remnants of my darkness, until my weakness is swallowed up in strength. I do not wish the hours to trickle away on anything else; those hours I find free from the need to rest my body or exercise my mind, or to pay the service we owe to men, or which we do not owe and yet pay.
Yet this is the time He has given me. This mound whose end I cannot see but which will most certainly End. And He has asked this of me: this slicing and shredding– that these hours be given away to these students, these children, this work of my hands.
What is it to Him, I wonder, this Time, Him for whom a year is like a day, and a day like a year? Does He see shreds and pieces, slices and fragments, or is there in the fractured moments of my life something gloriously whole that is, for me, as yet invisible? It is all of it His, yes? But I pull it from His hands and tear it with my own teeth. The shredding and the slicing– I did that.
What would it mean to gather them up, these pieces, and see them as a whole? I might begrudge their fleeting presence less. I might enjoy them more. I’m not sure I know how. Like most things, perhaps it will take practice.
“Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12
Excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and from the tenth book of St. Augustine’s Confessions.
