My daughter came to visit for the long weekend. Some friends mentioned that they were driving across the state, and so—on a whim, at the last minute—she threw some clothes in a bag, gathered up her schoolbooks, and piled into the car with her friends. And why not? It’s just 350 miles or so from the western side of South Dakota. Only a handful of hours on the road to come sleep on the couch in the little house I’ve been renting on the eastern side of the state, where I teach a few philosophy courses during the school year.
On a whim. At the last minute. Is it the whims that falter as we grow older? Or the minutes that grow weak? My college-aged daughter is like a speedboat, circling back in a flash to bounce across her own wake. These days, I feel more like a ponderous oil tanker. It takes me miles and many hours to shed my inertia and accomplish even a small course adjustment.
A few years ago, I was scheduled to fly off on a trip. I can’t recall where. Some swing through the colleges in a region somewhere, giving talks. And one day my wife said she’d noticed the trip on the calendar and wanted to be sure I had remembered to make the arrangements: plane tickets, rental car, and all the rest. “There’s only a month before you leave,” she pointed out. A few minutes later she returned, bemused, to ask, “Do you remember when a month seemed like a long time?”
We used to have a list of joking signals that one has grown old. When you stop being able to recognize half the songs on AM radio’s top-10 list. When you stare at the celebrity-gossip tabloids in the racks at the supermarket checkout line and realize you haven’t heard of most of the celebrities being gossiped about. For that matter, when Hamlet starts to seem a young idiot and King Lear feels like Shakespeare’s most telling play.
But the best sign may be the lack of nimbleness in time. Scheduling becomes more complicated. Leaving proves more cumbersome. I’ve always pictured myself as someone who travels light; a few clean clothes and a book or two should be enough to see me through. But now it’s medicines and electronics and extra shoes and multiple pairs of eyeglasses. And trousers to wear rolled.
Besides, the calendar is overfull with small commitments and minor plans, the regular tasks that squeeze our days down into smaller and smaller portions, till the months no longer seem a long time and the hours burn away quicker. I can’t remember the last time I was bored: truly bored, in that complete, world-rejecting way we could once feel. But I fear it’s not because my life is so exciting or my fascination with ordinary life so profound. It may be simply because time doesn’t stretch enough anymore to feel boredom. It may be because the clock is a lot less limber than it used to be.
Around 100 a.d., Plutarch related a story he heard about the Temple of Ammon in Egypt, where a flame for the oracle (famously consulted by Alexander the Great) had been kept burning for centuries. According to the priests—whose measures were religiously exact and whose records were complete nearly to the founding of the temple—the eternal fire needed less oil in a year than it had when the temple was built. What’s more, the decrease was consistent, each year requiring less oil than the year before. And the cause, the priests suggested, was the slow changing of the astronomical order. The years have grown shorter and time itself has picked up speed.
Plutarch expresses a little genial skepticism, having one of his characters observe that the nature of the purchased oil may have changed over the years, or the air of the temple may have become so saturated that the flames needed less fuel. This isn’t like guessing at the length of a lion from the size of its paw prints, Plutarch suggests. This is claiming a fundamental alteration in the universe from old ledgers in a dying Egyptian temple. We should refuse, he says, to draw a great conclusion from a trivial premise.
And maybe so. It’s a little much, I suppose, to extrapolate the whole arc of human life from the fragment of my daughter’s ability to dash across the state on a whim. At the last minute. Still, as we grow older, time does come to seem less limber, less plastic and pliable, than it did when we were young. And the hours and months slip by much faster, consuming less oil as they burn.
