Evanston RoundTable, July 31, 2025

I used to think that as one got older, the fog that obscures life’s Big Complexities would lift, life’s Big Puzzles would become clear and the Big Questions would invariably get answered.

If only.

As I head into my ninth decade, I realize the Big Questions don’t go away, they only grow broader and more complex.

Take, for example, the elusive and puzzling nature of time. Did it start at the Big Bang, as physicists assure us, and if so, what preceded that epochal event?

Equally puzzling is the shape-shifting nature of time. I’m not sure there’s anything interesting and original left to be said about it: “It’s the one thing you don’t have enough of” … “it flies (tempus fugit)” … “it waits for no man,” etc.

But at the temporal level, there’s nothing unusual about time. It ticks by at the precise and irrevocable speed of one second per second. What could be more mundane, more everyday (86,400 to the day, as it happens)? To be more precise, a second is 9,192,631,770 (i.e. 9.2 billion) microwave oscillations of a cesium atom, according to the National Institute of Science and Technology.

A shape shifter

And yet for all its specificity, time seems fantastically malleable: minutes and hours go by slow as paint drying; years and decades flit past like moths flying.

“This phenomenon of time seeming to speed up with age — or, for that matter, slow down under the influence of boredom or frustration — attracts a good deal of wonderment,” notes columnist Arthur C. Brooks in a long and thoughtful article in the latest edition of The Atlantic.

“The jarring juxtaposition of clock and calendar time with the subjective experience of time’s passing can make life feel like a poorly dubbed movie,” Brooks writes.

The subject is treated often in literature, which is appropriate, since time can seem to disappear altogether when one is curled up with a good book — or for that matter, in almost any absorbing activity: a good movie, a great conversation, a splendid golf game, a passionate hobby.

“Is this how it’s going to be for the rest of our lives?” complains a character in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. “Time dissolving into thick dark fog, things that happened last week seeming years ago, and things that happened last year seeming like yesterday?”

Highly subjective

Well, yes. Why is that? In his Atlantic article, Brooks writes that the French philosopher Henri Bergson “introduced the idea of time as a truly subjective unit of experience. A minute is not 60 ticks of a hand on the clock but rather a quantum of your individual existence. The size of that quantum depends on what you are doing: It is very small when you are sleeping; it is very large when you are waiting in line at Starbucks.”

In an interesting article in Psychology Today, British author and university lecturer Stephen Taylor notes that “Most of us feel that time moved very slowly when we were children and is gradually speeding up as we grow older. We’ve all remarked on it: how Christmas seems to come around quicker every year, how you’re just getting used to writing the date of the new year on your cheques and you realise that it’s almost over, how your children are about to finish school when it doesn’t seem long since you were changing their nappies.”

One explanation he cites is the “proportional theory,” in which time is experienced based on age: at 5, a year is 20% of your life, and therefore seems to last a very long time; at 50, a year is only 2% of your life, and correspondingly seems much shorter and proverbially flies by.

Another theory is biological: that the “speeding up of time is linked to how our metabolism gradually slows down as we grow older,” Taylor writes. “Because children’s hearts beat faster than ours, because they breathe more quickly and their blood flows more quickly, their body clocks ‘cover’ more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults.”

Dunno about that. I have my own theory, a conflation of time and memory I call memorytime, like space and time woven together in Einsteinian spacetime.

Mundane memories

Why do a handful of memories resonate strongly for a lifetime, while almost all others fade into the mists of oblivion? Obviously, the data capacity of our brains is limited, so the mundane stuff gets shoved to the back, and soon enough tossed out the door. That leaves traumatic and momentous events, not what I had for dinner two nights ago but my first night baseball game, the first time I met the woman who would become my wife, my brothers’ weddings and my own, our parents’ and my brothers’ deaths.

But then, how to account for seemingly trivial memories that can get stuck in the maw of memorytime?

Here’s one: Between the ages of 10 and 12 I was dispatched every summer to an eight-week sleepover camp an hour northwest of Portland, Maine. It was idyllic and memorable, especially one seemingly commonplace scene that nonetheless seven decades later still stands out vividly. It was parents’ weekend, and my parents had driven up from our home in Westchester County, New York, to spend time with me.

I was glad to see them: I was having a wonderful time at camp but had missed them. We three were evidently watching a camp baseball game (or maybe the game was open to parents; as a semi-pro baseball player in his youth, my dad would’ve loved that), but for some reason I was dispatched to my cabin to retrieve something, maybe a glove.

Here’s the part I remember as vividly as if it just happened: I’m at the cabin door, getting ready to head back to the ballfield. There’s no one else there. The only sound is the wind ruffling the tree leaves outside. It is a glorious New England summer afternoon.

That’s it.

What was that about, why just that seemingly mundane moment pinned like a butterfly to the cork board of memory? I recall that at that precise moment I felt ecstatically happy, almost transcendent with joy — for the breeze, the creaky screen door I’m about to push open, the glory of summer, of life buoyant and seemingly everlasting.

Perfect equilibrium

I was thankful also for the momentary solitude but looking forward to rejoining my parents. Somehow it had all come together: a state of some kind of supremely rare, perfect equilibrium of youth, energy, joy, togetherness and self-sufficiency fused with the glorious New England day.

There’s actually a name for this: tachypsychia. “One hypothesis for this tachypsychic phenomenon,” Brooks writes, “is that during these extremely intense moments, you lay down memories very densely in the brain, which makes a moment’s experience seem to endure an unusually long time.”

I have another theory about memorytime as well, that it varies by social connection, a kind of six degrees of contentment: The more people you know and enjoy being with, the more often time seems to disappear in their company. In the world’s “blue zones,” where people live a very long time, such longtime friendships are often cited as a reason for their longevity.

But these kinds of social connections are sadly rare, especially as we grow older and start to lose age cohorts. Being alone is one of the most common and deadly features of living to advanced old age.

Speaking of loneliness, the epidemic of isolation, that sad feature of aging, leads to another of life’s Big Questions, albeit a very strange one: Why does the universe require us to be solipsistic, solitary individuals, silos separate and apart from every other person alive or who has ever before lived? It seems so strange that looking out at others all I see of myself is a part of my nose, a stray, random part of anatomy that isn’t even particularly significant. And you see me and everyone else the same way. I hear my voice and can see my hands waving around, but as to how I appear to others, how I come across — a hugely valuable piece of information, it would seem — I’m often at a loss.

The solipsism of existence

In our current state, as anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss noted, “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of the village.”

I’d go further and say that often it stops at the end of our nose.

In a future with a different roll of the evolutionary dice, maybe we’ll all be a single, unitary consciousness, like those massive fungi fields in California or the huge groves of Pacific Northwest trees that have what appears to be a solitary mind through their underground root systems. It’s not hard to imagine less acrimony and less ego, more connection and more understanding in their system.

Perhaps we’ll come back as more enlightened beings, as a weeping willow tree in an Evanston park, and all these questions will be answered by the interconnected intelligence we’ll have at our disposal.