“Oh,” said Roland, slowly shaking his head, “I don’t think I’m saying anything particularly abstruse. You know, certainly, that the way in which we experience time qualitatively isn’t congruent with the way we measure time quantitatively. By the clock, a minute invariably takes sixty seconds, but in our experience of time a minute may seem either interminable or fleeting, depending on our situation, or on how the structure of retention and protention that stretches the present moment into an actual continuous now is... well, I suppose, how it’s either strained or relaxed by states of memory, anticipation... trauma or ecstasy, fear or longing...”
“Yes,” I said, nodding and drinking in more of my coffee.
“Time as intuited phenomenon and time as measurable magnitude are different things.”
“Definitely.”
“And, of course, one’s sense of duration alters as one ages. Time—at least, time as an experience—accelerates as the years accumulate. Memory descries an immense ocean at its most distant horizons, mountains and valleys and prairies in the far distance, foothills and narrow terraces in the middle distance, small enclosed gardens stretching from the near distance right to its doorstep. Childhood was boundlessly vast, youth’s discrete moments were full to overflowing with the promises and uncertainties of the future, early manhood was still a languid daydream of great things yet to come, possibilities yet to be realized; but then, all at once, at a threshold you never noticed crossing, the days began to pass more quickly, and then more quickly still, and then much more quickly than you had ever imagined possible. Transient experiences became ever more deliquescent, tasks displaced dreams and anxieties displaced hopes, and as your years accrued to you your sense of the present continuously contracted. And then the memories of all the things that are now irrecoverable entirely chased any expectations for the future away forever. Life is long, or so it seems until all at once you find that life is brief, and the change came on you, you realize, all in an instant you can’t now recall.” A strangely saturnine smile played for a moment across his features. “Consider this: if you and I are both alive a little less than a year hence, I’ll have been with you for fully one-quarter of your life.”
“No, surely...” I paused and made the simple calculation. “My lord,” I murmured.
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