How rare to have a day, a whole day, to myself. But here it is, that day, after weeks of travelling back and forth from one place to another. I am here in the South; the room is light. We watch Fanny and Alexander, mum and I; I have borrowed her laptop.
A Danish family does not celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day, but on the day before. Yesterday, it was Christmas, and today? Other people’s Christmas. Books about India piled up on the floor. A new edition of Scrabble, which we played until the early hours last night. Jo Malone bags and a new diary and the copy of In the Shadow of No Towers I bought for my sister, and the set of Allen Keys I got from my brother-in-law and the bicycle lights I bought for him.
Why not write about our meals and conversations, the time at the pub – these events which make up the substance of life? Sometimes I imagine to myself these events are like the water that turns the waterwheel, flowing ceaselessly in order to turn it, time – that they do not occur, these events, within time but across it. Yes, that’s how I imagine it: we exist for the sake of time, for the turning of events; so we are drawn into the drama of life and death.
Then it is by passing events across time that moments are separated from their original co-happening. As though everything happened together, all at once – and all events are overlapped, even now. It is a question of perception – of finding the right angle, from which all can be seen. How old am I now? How many Christmases have there been? But they have all happened at once; they overlap. What day is this? What year?
Leave time to itself, and what would it become? Leave it to itself, time, and what would it become? Non-event, non-happening; the return of what does not occur and does not happen.
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