Four of the six weeks of “Sommerferien” went to sandcastles down the Mediterranean coast of Cabo de Palos – four weeks that felt like a geological era, and they take up more room in my memory than entire years do now.
Every adult summer since is gone by the time I’ve found the sunscreen. The calendar swears they’re the same length. Nothing in the body agrees.
A man named Paul Janet proposed the mechanism in 1877. You measure each stretch of time against the whole of the life you’ve already lived. A year is a tenth of everything when you’re ten, and a fortieth of it when you’re forty. The year didn’t shrink; your ruler grew.
And each summer is a thinner slice of a thicker book, and it reads faster every time. Elegant, endlessly repeated, and when someone finally went and measured it the effect came in at about a third of what the model predicts.
Novelty does the rest: a child’s July is nothing but firsts, an adult’s is a photocopy of the last one, and memory only files the firsts. You didn’t lose the time per se… just stopped writing it down.
Under both sits a stranger fact: we run on two clocks that disagree.
One is the body’s, old and elastic, the one that makes a dull meeting sag and a good night vanish. The other is the machine on the wall, and it is a startlingly recent tyrant. For most of human history nobody owned the hour: you worked by the sun and the season and the ache in your back.
The mechanical clock came out of medieval monasteries, built to summon monks to prayer, and our word “noon” still wears the fingerprint: it descends from the Latin for the ninth prayer hour, which slid over centuries from mid-afternoon to midday, dragged there by the bell.
We let the bell win.
We decided the wall clock is the real one and the body’s is a glitch to be scheduled around, medicated, overridden, until every hour became the same width as the last.
The watch insists this summer is the same length as all the ones you remember.
It’s wrong. It’s just the last thing still arguing.
Related: Time Is A Feeling – where the full argument lives.
Sources: Janet, Revue philosophique III, 1877 · Friedman & Janssen, Acta Psychologica