masks of time
for the past month or so I've been reading Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, which is, amongst other things, an extended & brilliant rhapsody on the theme of time. aptly, then, reading it has also been a bizarrely temporal experience. sometimes I open the book after lunch -- hours pass like minutes and the story surges forward with all the relentless fortitude of high tide, and suddenly night has fallen. other times -- an entire plane journey to pisa rolls lazily over two pages, for instance. and as the end of the novel creeps closer, I find myself growing unaccountably anxious, rationing out the pages in little teaspoons of allotted time, forcing myself to slow down & stretch the story out over the inexorable seconds.
but time is lived in this way: an eternal oscillation between too much and too little, and everything in between. sometimes: freights of events heaped into too-small units of time, like oceans into teacups. two PhD interviews condensing a lifetime of learning into 45 minutes of interrogation. other times: hours streched out like a yawn. tedious conversations bleeding past in an agony of polite smiles. "so much to do in this life," one might declare in lofty universals, while the particulars of living dribble away in mealtimes and internet surfing.
so I've been remarking often, lately, that a given period of time has passed in a "rather magic-mountainish" way, meaning that there has been something peculiar about my perception of its passing. but I am beginning to see that it is rather that Magic Mountain has captured something essential and true, and peculiar, of the passage of time. it's been, for example, eight months since I've been at cambridge (seems like yesterday); thirty days before the thesis deadline (seems like tomorrow); and a week before I find out about the outcomes of various PhD funding interviews (seems like a lifetime). and I've just spent 42 minutes composing this post, and suddenly it's almost dark outside & I am going to visit someone with whom all the time in the world dissolves.