Another birthday has come and gone. I hear old Sam Beckett’s pessimistic shout: “We breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideas!” Surely it is not a year since the last one. Doris Lessing in her autobiography Under My Skin describes how perception of time passing changes utterly as one gets older. She describes her experience as a child:
“How far away it was, the condition of being grown up and free, for I was still in the state when the end of the day could hardly be glimpsed from its start…. There is no way of conveying in words the difference between child-time and grown-up time…. in the story of a life, if it is being told true to time as outwardly experienced, then I’d say 70% of the book would take you to age 10. At 80% you would have reached 15. At 95% you get to about 30. The rest is a rush towards eternity.”
