Timescales
Make the faster parts slow, and make the slower parts fast.
Brazil 2019
For over forty-five minutes, as began a story I heard this week, the pilot talked about a recent emergency. While ignoring any need for breaths, this pilot, whom I’ve never seen, apparently spoke about an intense, dangerous situation, one where the ground itself was uncooperative in its closeness. Both the pilot and the plane specialize in acrobatics, or, put another way, in maneuvers that would stress actual birds. In the retelling that I heard, the pilot explained the nuances and risks and calculations behind all of his decisions during this forty-five minute period, but the decisions themselves didn’t take two minutes.
How this pilot distilled a flash of activity into a lengthy, comprehensive speech isn’t—once you consider it—that unusual. The timeline of memory almost never matches the actual duration of an event: minutes are enlarged, hours are compressed, entire years are encapsulated by single sentences. And his story seems consistent with how I remember particular sensations and notable images from my own past.
The neurological understanding of how memories are shaped during novel or intense events is relevant here. A flood of chemicals, washing over our brains like waves on a jetty, infuse us with an eternal imprint of those experiences that we deem grand, or stunning, or horrid. Immersed in a warm bath of sensations, there’s a shift in how we account for the passing seconds, and our perception of time really does slow. But that accounting of seconds is forever oscillating: your subjective experience of clock ticks in a windowless, empty room is quite different than your experience of the seconds before a car veers into your lane.
Having the duration of events not correspond to our memory shouldn’t surprise us. Seasons pass without a eventful word; entire years are sometimes remembered by the lens of particular, crucial days. What we have are fragments of memory, little chunks, associations, all of them long since detached from any sense of time.
Earlier this week, to select just one point from the past, I reread Tropic Moon, the Georges Simenon novel that reveals a bit more of itself with each rereading, its words forever shifting on the page. The novel comes in a jerky, drifting narrative, the timeline never quite coherent. Joseph Timar arrives in Gabon and the dreamlike chapters follow his perspective: some pages represent single moments, some individual words represent days. Libreville is boiling, there’s drunkenness, dengue fever, delirium, and page-by-page the reader inhabits this world.
Lunch. A stupefying snooze. Cocktail. Dinner. Once again Timar left before closing time. He didn’t sleep. He heard all the conversations, the sound of the billiard balls, the coins jingling on the counter, the boy shutting the Venetian blinds and locking the doors.
How much time passes?
He fell asleep two or three times, but only briefly. He felt a painful drowsiness brought on by the heat and the motion of the canoe. At last the sun sank behind the trees. There was a short dusk, a semblance of coolness, a less brutal glare in which things regained some of their color. Fifteen minutes later it was night and they still hadn’t reached Libreville.
Simenon restricts himself to a sparse, fairly basic vocabulary, yet his sentences are deceptive—much of the tension, and the hypnotic qualities of his story, results from that choice. Simenon—along with the pilot above—knows a timeworn rule for tension: make the faster parts slow, and make the slower parts fast.
Nothing that Simenon writes distracts from the trancelike sensation that he wants. The reader is forced to live inside Joseph Timar’s mind, to confront his decisions, deal with his fears, absorb his alcohol, live with his sickness, until what’s left on the page is the residue of Timar’s memory. The gaps in the narrative, in fact, make the story more lifelike than any factual account. Timar’s perceptions, and the endless shifts from an expansive to restrictive timeline, are just like our memories.
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