How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
SUCH BEAUTIFUL WRITING! I just finished this beautiful novel and was writing a quick review for my monthly book reports, but I was having such trouble choosing one excerpt to share! Haig has the perfect way to consider how time can be a comfort or a hinderance to us and how precious our lives truly are.
The novel is a thoughtful look into the meaning of life and time. Tom has a rare condition that causes him to age very slowly so that he has already lived hundreds of years. He married in the 1600s and still misses his wife, who died of the Plague, but knows his daughter has the same condition and he’s determined to find her. Can you imagine living long enough to meet Shakespeare or Scott Fitzgerald and travel all over the world? If you hold yourself back to prevent yourself from loving and getting attached to someone, are you really living?
I’ve selected all my favorites here so I can remember them and hold them close long after I forget this book. I hope you enjoy.
… although you can gaze at the past, you can’t visit it. Not really. I can’t sit by a tree in a forest and have my mother sing to me. I can’t walk along Fairfield Road and see Rose and her sister again, selling fruit out of a basket. I can’t cross the old London Bridge and enter Elizabethan Southwark. I can’t go back and offer more words of comfort to Rose in that dark house on Chapel Street. I can’t ever see Marion as a little girl again. I can’t go back to a time when the world’s map wasn’t known. I can’t walk snowy streets lined with beautiful Victorian streetlamps and choose not to visit Dr Hutchinson. I can’t go back to 1891 and tell myself not to follow Agnes onto the Etruria. The yellow bird sits on a windowsill for a while and then it flies away. That is nature. There are things I have experienced that I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was – is – a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.
And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?
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?
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.
The past is not one separate place. It is many, many places, and they are always ready to rise into the present. One minute it is the 1590s, the next it is the 1920s. And it is all related. It is all the accumulation of time. It builds up and builds up and can catch you violently off guard at any moment. The past resides inside the present, repeating, hiccupping, reminding you of all the stuff that no longer is. It bleeds out from road signs and plaques on park benches and songs and surnames and faces and the covers of books. Sometimes just the sight of a tree or a sunset can smack you with the power of every tree or sunset you have ever seen and there is no way to protect yourself. There is no possible way of living in a world without books or trees or sunsets. There just isn’t.
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.
As far as I can see, this is a problem with living in the twenty-first century. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photoshopped and filtered.
I thought we were going to talk about bicycles or cars or aeroplanes. Trains, telephones, photographs, electric lightbulbs, TV shows, computers, rockets to the moon. Skyscrapers. Einstein. Gandhi. Napoleon. Hitler. Civil rights. Tchaikovsky. Rock. Jazz. Kind of Blue. Revolver. Does he like ‘The Boys of Summer’? Hip-hop. Sushi bars. Picasso. Frida Kahlo. Climate change. Climate denial. Star Wars. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Beyoncé. Twitter. Emojis. Reality TV. Fake news. Donald Trump. The continual rise and fall of empathy. What we did in the wars. Our reasons to carry on.
People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don’t die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters. If you stop mourning them, and start listening to them, they still have the power to change your life. They can, in short, be salvation.
Omai strokes water off his board. ‘No. Not for me. Love is where you find the meaning. Those seven years I was with her contained more than anything else. Do you understand? You can take all the years before and since and weigh them next to those, and they wouldn’t stand a chance. That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.’
you cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.
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 we think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard.
There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other. Yes. It is clear. In those moments that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.
