Suddenly I am 85 years old. I find that ridiculous but chronologically it is a fact. I recall with distaste old Sam Beckett’s pessimistic shout: “We breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideas!” Surely all those years have not come and gone with such headlong quickness. Doris Lessing in her autobiography Under My Skin describes how perception of time passing changes utterly as one gets older. She describes her experience as a child:
“How far away it was, the condition of being grown up and free, for I was still in the state when the end of the day could hardly be glimpsed from its start…there is no way of conveying in words the difference between child-time and grown-up time…in the story of a life, if it is being told true to time as outwardly experienced, then I’d say 70% of the book would take you to age 10. At 80% you would have reached 15. At 95% you get to about 30. The rest is a rush towards eternity.”
That is perfectly true. As one gets older life becomes an ever increasing blur of days, weeks, months, years. If one keeps a journal and looks back on the year past the days are packed enough with incidents and people and events, joys and fears and a hundred small triumphs and tribulations – as the days have always been. But it is living through it all that gets quicker and quicker. Someone has pushed the fast-forward button.