Small children restructure a parent’s experience of time into an enclosed present

Evidence

I believe the main reason for that is our children, since life with them in the here and now occupies all the space. They even squeeze out the most recent past: ask me what I did three days ago and I can’t remember. … For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. At the same time I see that precisely this repetitiveness, this enclosedness, this unchangingness is necessary, it protects me. On the few occasions I have left it, all the old ills return. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 100

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the boat-in-a-lock image that also evokes Proust’s lost-time project Knausgaard names in this same chapter. — connects to: Childhood familiarity with a place makes its real-world existence seem fragile — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 193; A generation born into digital micro-sliced media experiences time as disconnected presents. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 53

Broader Connections

• Childhood familiarity with a place makes its real-world existence seem fragile #expands (0.55) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 193