Meetings don't have to be endless to be eternal.
The Beatles had a six-year career, from 1963 to 1969, which - to me, in my early 20s - seemed like a phenomenally long time.
I think 'Hollow City' only took a year and a half to write... but it felt like two and a half!
When you were a kid, a day was a long time and a year was a long time.
Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
Our specious present as such is very short. We do, however, experience passing events; part of the process of the passage of events is directly there in our experience, including some of the past and some of the future.
I've only been gone a week," I reminded him. Well, a week's a long time. It's seven days. Which is one hundred and sixty-eight hours. Which is ten thousand, eighty minutes. Which is six hundred thousand, for hundred seconds.
The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.
Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.
