between un-being and being

perhaps everything I write is about time

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Dandelion clocks twinkle in the dewy fields: last week’s golden flowers have metamorphosed into delicate, feathery silver globes. Dandelion time is fragile — susceptible to the brush of a passing creature, or a sudden gust of wind — but perhaps clock time, too, is more insubstantial than I once imagined. Soon, the year will be half gone; I feel myself clinging to it tightly, trying not to let it slip away, but still the moments drift from me: lighter than feathers, softer than air.

One evening, finding ourselves alone in the house, my eldest son and I watch Dead Poets Society, a film I adored in my youth. I haven’t seen it since I was his age — seventeen — the exact same age as the boys who form the Dead Poets Society. “Carpe Diem,” Robin Williams whispers to them, “Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.” My son listens intently. I study his profile and try to recall the sense of hopeful invincibility, of how it felt to have time stretch on ahead of me, endless and elastic: the future as yet unwritten. Like gossamer seeds, these days with him float through my hands and I cannot grasp them.

The next morning, I read a piece in the New Yorker that leaves me spinning: ‘the phone eats time’, writes the author, Jia Tolentino, ‘it makes us live the way people do inside a casino’. Reading this (of course) on my phone, I let the device fall from my hand as if it has burnt me — siren, seductress, thief. My time is being consumed, hours and endless hours have been stolen from me. I've idly been considering a tattoo — a few words in a cursive script, a line of poetry like my friend

Freya Rohn

has — but now I feel the urge to issue myself a caution. Should I inscribe ‘the phone eats time’ on the inside of my wrist, an indelible reminder whenever I reach for distraction?

In allowing ourselves the constant stimulation of the phone screen, Christine Rosen explains that we are losing “interstitial time”: the gaps between events, the spaces; the pauses; the stretches of everyday liminality that hold us gently as we wait. This, I think, is time I can try to reclaim. We are forgetting, she says, how to daydream, and so now I must remind myself.

I bury my phone at the bottom of my bag and, throwing a book on top, I step out into the green morning. My phone eats time, I know this, but there are ways I’ve learned to slow it too — when I swim sparkling laps around the quarry, or float on my back in the sea, everything stays far away. These moments feel thick like honey. Walking down the lane through clouds of cow parsley, the leafy canopy overhead casts polka dot patches of light onto the ground, the horse chestnut tree shakes petals over my hair like snowflakes, and I feel time flicker.

I return — as I always have — to poetry. In ‘Burnt Coker’ (named for a country house not far from where I live) T.S. Eliot brings us back again and again to a memory of a rose-garden — dust motes floating in a shaft of sunlight, children’s laughter echoing from the shadows. Obsessed with the riddle of time, he writes of being caught ‘between un-being and being’, hovering at the ‘still point of the turning world’. My copy of Four Quartets is tatty — page corners turned down and phrases underlined in pencil: I re-read it in hope of answers. The elusive pause between the moments is what I am always seeking — perhaps everything I write is somehow about time.

In the hour before sunset, I walk along the edge of the field with my boys. The smallest one snaps the stem of a seed clock, lifting it to his lips. He blows, and tiny parachutes spin and scatter, dissipating into the evening. The seeds spread twirling; they dance across our path and up into the light.

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