It's Sunday evening, quiet and peaceful here. A single bird is chirping. Harriet and Gem are asleep. I've been reading “On The Calculation of Volume” all afternoon. Actually, I finished Book l and immediately began Book ll-- The novel is strangely addictive despite being quite repetitive (there are seven books in total, but only four have been translated from Danish, so far.) The narrator, a dealer of collectible books, has inexplicably gotten stuck in a time loop. (The book is not sci-fi beyond its premise; it's more philosophical, really.) Every day she wakes up and it's the 18th of November. Her husband and family and the rest of the world presumedly continues on into the next day, where she may or may not exist at all. But she doesn't seem to ponder this (whether or not some version of her exists in the future). Instead, she contemplates the nature of time and tries to work out the inconsistencies. For a year, she marks each day that passes, hoping for time to resume, while, little by little, learning to live in a new way.
I've been thinking that growing old is sort of like living the same day again and again. Memories are hazy and the past is unreal. The present can seem like a long unspooling of days.
I went to see my mother yesterday. She is 91 and in good health. She said, “What are you doing with your hair?”
“You don't like it?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “You're too young to let it go grey.”
“I'm 68,” I told her. “I'll be 70 in two years.”
“I can't believe that,” she said. (She'd like me to be the young beauty I was.)
I can't quite believe it either. I still feel like myself. They're saying now that aging accelerates at age 60, and that seems to be true. Sometime this decade, it took a leap. Like the narrator of “On The Calculation of Volume,” I'm learning to live in a new way.