Posted on February 20
By reflex, I always choose the fastest route when the GPS offers several options. Recently, while traveling in France, I suddenly found myself without a phone. I then had to return to my hotel via landmarks from my own memory. This new improvised route took me past the Louvre pyramid, which I had never seen at night. I had certainly lost 15 or 30 minutes, maybe more. But the majestic beauty of this illuminated structure made me ask myself the following questions: what would I have done with this time if I had taken a shorter route? What would I have done with all those minutes saved in the past? How much have I wasted altogether in my life? I will obviously never have answers, especially since for me, time is very vague and very elastic.
I have a friend who claims to have an internal biological clock. He has the incredible ability to know what time it is at all times, a skill that is completely foreign to me. In order to check if his clock was working even unconsciously, I suggested that we take a nap at the same time. When we woke up, he estimated that our sleep had lasted between 15 and 20 minutes, which corresponded to the 18 minutes on the stopwatch, whereas I had bet on 50 seconds, 5 hours or perhaps an entire night. I was thoroughly beaten, but I was able to accurately describe an image from my dream to her: a drop of water lying on a petal of a camellia flower in a Japanese temple.
Since my body never feels the exact time, I don’t suffer from jet lag.
Since the Louvre, I no longer try to use time as a unit of measurement. In my head, I’m no longer 53, but rather the age that sits in that rare window where the phrase “if youth knew, if old age could” doesn’t apply.
I’m at the age where my arms are still fast enough to juggle, between videoconferences, balls of wool from the dryer and dumplings for supper. I am of the age when the heart intuitively knows that Mr. Raymond, behind his shelves of oranges and apples at the grocery store, once picked grapefruits in a kibbutz during his traveling youth. All it took was a question about a scratch on his cheek to gain access to a few pages of this rich human book.
Thanks to the title of a painting by Anselm Kiefer quoting the poet Ingeborg Bachmann: “Your age and my age and the age of the world cannot be measured in years” (free translation: your age and my age and the age of the world cannot be counted in years), I allowed myself one more measure: my age varies according to the person in front of me.
I am the age of my son’s lover when we discuss together his choices for his master’s degree, that of my grandmother when I embroider words to immortalize them on a piece of fabric; that of Sophia and Penelope when I fell backwards in their balloon bath.
An Italian physicist explained to me (if I understood correctly) that time is relative because it does not circulate at the same speed around the black hole as around the Earth. I tried to convince her that time is also relative because it depends on the sensations and emotions it brings or provokes. Romain Gary wrote that “Tenderness has seconds that beat slower than others” when we all know that the first kisses contain grains of eternity and the last mark our skin, right?
I know sometimes you have to be precise, like cooking times in cookbooks. However, the minutes do not take into account variables such as the type of sugar, the size of the garlic cubes, the heat of the round beforehand, the material of the pan; so I believe it is clearer to specify that the caramel for the caramelized pork should reach the color of 72% dark chocolate instead of stating 3 minutes. It seems to me that I would reduce the margin of error if I wrote that roasted garlic to sprinkle on a sweet and sour tamarind soup is at its best when it approaches the color of the sand of the Îles-de-la -Madeleine.
I am convinced that we can taste the time. Contrary to fast food, we attribute healing powers to chicken broth and find stews comforting us. The long hours of cooking allow sustained attention during the preparation of these dishes, making them graspable, tangible, memorable. This time becomes the hand that soothes the feverish forehead, the arm that wraps around the outstretched shoulder, the heart that murmurs whispers.
Therefore, it takes time.
… but differently, because our time is told.