Time is a strange elastic thing. A day at home pottering through the domestic routine just whisks away, and in no time at all we are sitting by the woodburner and then going upstairs to bed. Two days away in London and time seems to have stretched. Driving back from the station on Friday afternoon it felt as if we had been away all week. If you want to get more time out of your life do something different. I can sort of understand that one.
Time and memory though, that's a strange fluid thing, not the elasticity of stretching out the moment but instead a fluidity, moving, changing, like rushing water. And just like water, memory is sometimes cloudy and dark, sometimes pellucidly clear. We spent Thursday morning last week in the Courtauld Gallery. This was absolutely my territory when I was at university, forty years ago now. Somerset House and the Courtauld are right next door to King's College where I studied, and failed to study, English Literature in the seventies. The Courtauld is a smallish gallery with a fantastic collection of Impressionist paintings. I used to go to the gallery by myself for an hour or so in the middle of the day to escape a noisy commonroom or to remove myself from sight when there was a lecture I didn't want to go to. I know I did this, with the intellectual part of my memory, but I can't feel it. That girl from forty years ago doesn't feel like me. She was another person.
This is not the case with all the different parts of my past. Much of my childhood and adolescence is vivid to me. The period when my children were very young feels as if it only just happened. Then much of the time when my first marriage broke up and I struggled with money has slipped down under the water, as has quite a bit of my working life. Occasional bright memories leap up like a salmon: with my children on a beach in Cornwall lighting a fire in a small stone lined pit and cooking sausages as the sun went down, climbing Blencathra in the snow with Ian, the sun setting over the sea in the far North West of Scotland, achingly clear the births of all six of the grandchildren. Then there are more prosaic but still vivid memories: speaking at a conference in Las Vegas, learning how to plot a course without GPS in a room full of would be sailors in Hoylake, painting a window on a shaky ladder. But whole tracts of my life seem to have happened to another person, someone I have read about, so that I know the facts but can't recall how it felt or even exactly what I did and some has gone entirely, right down under the water.
I was thinking something like that as we walked along the Strand past the entrance to the college and turned into the Courtauld. Where had it all gone, those years of my life, disappeared, down under the water. We paid to see the Botticelli drawings for Dante's Inferno and very beautiful and moving they were. How strange, I was thinking, that the girl with the long hair and the floaty tops and the platform shoes was me. I had been here countless times but I felt no connection at all. I admired the Seurats, I tried to understand the French teenagers laughing in front of me, with only partial success. And then we went through a door and Manet's girl at a bar in the Folies Bergere looked out across the room and the moment was one of those leaping salmon.
I had been here countless times. I remembered the tall windows and the sun striping the floor. I remembered feeling her sadness, as she failed to meet my eye. I remembered wondering if I had time for one more Cezanne before the bus went and my embroidered bag heavy with books on my shoulder.
And then it went again, back into the stream. I walked. I saw different things. We crossed Waterloo Bridge and met a dear friend for lunch.
This is not the case with all the different parts of my past. Much of my childhood and adolescence is vivid to me. The period when my children were very young feels as if it only just happened. Then much of the time when my first marriage broke up and I struggled with money has slipped down under the water, as has quite a bit of my working life. Occasional bright memories leap up like a salmon: with my children on a beach in Cornwall lighting a fire in a small stone lined pit and cooking sausages as the sun went down, climbing Blencathra in the snow with Ian, the sun setting over the sea in the far North West of Scotland, achingly clear the births of all six of the grandchildren. Then there are more prosaic but still vivid memories: speaking at a conference in Las Vegas, learning how to plot a course without GPS in a room full of would be sailors in Hoylake, painting a window on a shaky ladder. But whole tracts of my life seem to have happened to another person, someone I have read about, so that I know the facts but can't recall how it felt or even exactly what I did and some has gone entirely, right down under the water.
I was thinking something like that as we walked along the Strand past the entrance to the college and turned into the Courtauld. Where had it all gone, those years of my life, disappeared, down under the water. We paid to see the Botticelli drawings for Dante's Inferno and very beautiful and moving they were. How strange, I was thinking, that the girl with the long hair and the floaty tops and the platform shoes was me. I had been here countless times but I felt no connection at all. I admired the Seurats, I tried to understand the French teenagers laughing in front of me, with only partial success. And then we went through a door and Manet's girl at a bar in the Folies Bergere looked out across the room and the moment was one of those leaping salmon.
I had been here countless times. I remembered the tall windows and the sun striping the floor. I remembered feeling her sadness, as she failed to meet my eye. I remembered wondering if I had time for one more Cezanne before the bus went and my embroidered bag heavy with books on my shoulder.
And then it went again, back into the stream. I walked. I saw different things. We crossed Waterloo Bridge and met a dear friend for lunch.
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