There is no other way of living life
other than within time. The technological paradise in which we live reminds us
of this by surrounding us with clocks. We have put time-pieces in every machine
we own as if to say to them ‘we are time-bound; you machines should share our
condition’. But even without these time machines, our bodies themselves remind
us how time-bound we are. We grow and then we decline; and we are never not either growing or declining.
There was a time when this observation
was used by poets to do what poets have always done: seduce women. So, Andrew
Marvell writing ‘To his coy mistress’ penned the memorable couplet
But
at my back I always hear
Time's
winged chariot hurrying near
His playful theme is this: the woman’s
shyness is preserving her chastity is a failure to see how short the time is
for the lovers. Indeed, the alluring glow of her young skin, like the dew of
the morning, is a sign of just how temporary bodily life is. There is no
stilling the onward march of time; there is only the chance to enjoy life’s
pleasures while they are on offer. The seductive power of the poem is the way
in which Marvell takes the rather serious idea of the passing of time and human
mortality and cheekily offers it as a gambit in his own bedroom politics.
We don’t do poems quite like that anymore.
Perhaps the ladies to whom such poems are addressed have heard it all before.
But idea that time is passing for human beings even as they think about still
fascinates poets. The English poet Philip Larkin, who died in 1985, did not
write big philosophical books with grand-sounding titles like Being and Time. That was not his way.
Yet he compressed a great deal of profundity into his small, plain-speaking poems.
One of the themes that interested him most was the passing of time – not in a
grand historical sense, but in the sense of the passing of an ordinary human
life.
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where
can we live but days?
(‘Days’)
Days are not like some cul-de-sac–laced
suburb in which we can purchase a nice piece of real estate. We cannot live
anywhere else. Here we are, living in them. They are the base fact of our life:
there is no point contesting them. You might as well find a way to be happy in
your days.
But Larkin has a second stanza to add
to this first:
Ah,
solving that question
Brings
the priest and the doctor
In
their long coats
Running
over the fields.
This is faintly satirical, or at least
a little barbed. The priest and the doctor are the great explainers, the great
question solvers who rush with as much haste as they can summon to make us
think we can live somewhere else other than in ‘days’. This, Larkin appears to
saying, is futile. There is no answer to the question ‘where can we live but
days?’ but ‘nowhere’. Or, there is no ‘answer’, because getting to the point of
asking the question is in fact the insight that the poet wants us to grasp.
Though these poems and their authors couldn’t
be different, they are both interested in the connection between human
happiness and the human experience of time. We have days, says Larkin, ‘to be
happy in’. Marvell reminds his mistress that there isn’t a lot of love-making
happening in the coldness of the tomb: pleasure has to take place within a
particular moment. The rather crass but perfectly true equation is this: if you
have no moments, you can have no pleasure.
Larkin was not always so upbeat about
the time of human living. If days were to be happy in, then this rumination from
his later poem ‘Dockery and Son’ reveals how allusive this happiness was to
him:
Life
is first boredom, then fear.
Whether
or not we use it, it goes,
And
leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And
age, and then the only end of age.
‘The only end of age’: death, whose
forerunner is the physical decay and illness of old age. Boredom and fear might
seem an odd coupling. On the one hand, the bored person cannot think what to do
with the time. And yet that is the overture to an anxiety about losing time - a
fear of what may happen as one approaches the pain, suffering and oblivion that
we all inevitably face. Larkin teases us with his mysterious, fatalistic reference
to a ‘something hidden from us’ which chooses the things that are to be left
from our lives. There is some blind and inaccessible force beyond us that marks
our times – whether the grinding mechanism of cause and effect or some
quasi-divine force like fate, we are unsure. Whatever it is, the effect is the
same: a feeling of complete impotence as we see the past freezing behind us,
and the number of our days to come rapidly falling.
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