One night, when he was a boy, William Wordsworth stole a boat. As he plunged the oars, he saw a mountain, ominous and black, rise in the horizon, and higher rise, until it blocked the stars. It appeared to leap onto the lake and harry him across the water. After, he was not the same; usurping his habitual thoughts were “huge and mighty Forms that do not live / Like living men.”
The adult Wordsworth prizes this moment, its intermingling of terror and ecstasy. Such mysterious “spots of time” mark when we are most alive, and they make us who we fundamentally are.
How to activate these memories?
Sometimes the most random event—the offhand tasting of a madeleine crumbled in tea—will evoke a whole childhood, as it did for Marcel Proust. But a more predictable technique for conjuring our essential memories is to visit their places of origin.
We all have nostalgic haunts: that hill where you had your first kiss, or the skate park still decorated with your graffiti, or the library where you first read your favorite YA novel.
Then there are the more secret locales, where things happened you didn’t tell your parents about: the bleachers where you failed at sex and hurled from Smirnoff, the riverbank where you backed down from a fight.
But what about the places where the really weird s**t went down, things you’ve never told anybody about? These are the sources of your most potent memories—startling, enigmatic, formative.
The woods where you found those decayed Hustlers while you were playing Capture the Flag. The backyard where you happened upon your math teacher sunbathing topless when you were taking the shortcut home from school. Your dad’s toolshed, where you found that long blonde hair.
When you reach your strange place, stand there for five minutes with your eyes closed, imagining the memory as clearly as you can. Focus on concrete details, the stark “is-ness” of the event. And don’t try too hard to figure out what the memory means. It probably means nothing, other than the world is strange, and most vital when most strange. Channeling this inscrutable energy, you feel enlivened yourself, and, if you are sad, renovated.
If on some days delving into memory has its uses, sometimes the past feels too fixed, as if written in stone. Other days, we want shape time to fit our own pace. We concentrate on the present.
If you are thrown into a life-or-death situation, adrenaline quickens your inner clock, and the world outside your skin seems to slow down. At the other extreme, post-traumatic time ap- pears to stop. You continually relive the pain, obliterating the present and the future. As psychiatrist Robert D. Stolorow puts it, you are “freeze-framed.”
We need not suffer extremes to alter temporality. If you were forced to trade in your computer for an older one, you’d find the delay between double-clicking on a file and its opening to be, relatively speaking, slow. But you would eventually adapt to the delay, and the opening would seem instantaneous. Researchers call this process “intentional binding,” and they wonder if a feeling of ownership over a process can quicken time.
Simple shifts in attention can also distort time. If we continually look at the clock, then time is sluggish. But when you don’t worry about the ticking, so immersed you are in an activity, time accelerates.
Distort time.
Speed it up. Throw yourself into an enterprise you love—tennis, baking, painting, sex—and fifteen minutes feel like five. You are so in sync with the present that you stop looking backward with nostalgia or regret, or forward with anticipation or fear. Time loses its rub. This is eternity: not infinite duration, but in- tense ephemera.
Now slow it down. Instead of relaxing into an effortless practice, pay attention to an unfamiliar object. Note it minutely, inch by inch. How does it relate to your past? How might it affect your future? After this exertion, look at the clock. Five minutes have seemed fifteen.
What have you learned?
First, the world inside your skull and the one without run at different speeds, and this is disconcerting, since you can never quite tell which clock is correct.
Second, this disturbing gap can be exhilarating, an invitation to shape time to suit your mood, and so feel free, however briefly, of painful hours.
From How to Be Weird: An Off-Kilter Guide to Living a One-of-a Kind Life by Eric G. Wilson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Eric G. Wilson.
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