Reading as Chaotic Time Travel 🕰️

Time slows down and speeds up. Crackles. Implodes. Explodes.

May 22, 2024

Human beings love to f*ck with time. We take substances that dilate a minute until it feels like an hour. We escape into our phones to shorten those in-between times. We take a photo, hoping that when we see it later, it will give us that moment back—a “buy one moment, get one free!” special.

Reading is perhaps the most chaotic form of time traveling. It allows us to live future lives we’ve never imagined, revisit themes of our past, or grapple with the questions of our present. My favorite writing does everything at once. It pushes us into a liminal space where we’re thinking about ourselves and the character and everyone we know at once. Our edges blur. Time slows down and speeds up. Crackles. Implodes. Explodes.

The sunset from my touchdown in Charleston. Note to self: GIFS play with time in a weird way, too!

This week, I’ve been thinking about how my own reading practice alters my relationship with the clock. I just finished Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, a book that plays with time in curious, spooky ways.

The story follows Natalie Waite, a 17-year-old hoping that her departure to college will help her escape her controlling, narcissistic father. But an incident that happens right before she leaves her family haunts her time on campus, causing her to slowly unravel as she descends, rather than ascends, into adulthood.

While the story moves in a linear fashion, Jackson is skilled at ballooning simple moments. For example, a knock on the door becomes:

“A knock on her door was as strange a thing to her as the fact of the door itself; at first she thought, It is a mistake; she wasted a minute thinking of someone looking at the outside of the door steadfastly, as she looked on the inside, and meant to mark the next day whether the panels outside were the same as those inside; odd, she thought, that someone standing outside could look at the door, straight ahead, seeing the white paint and the wood, and I inside looking at the door and the white paint should look straight also, and we two looking should not see each other because there is something in the way. Are two people regarding the same thing not looking at each other?”

(A moment of silence for all the semicolons.)

I’ve noticed that paragraphs like this one have such a unique effect on my brain. First, they add depth to a mundane experience and draw out moments I’ve spent on one side of the door (metaphorical and physical), a friend/stranger/family member on the other. Second, they slow the moment with the character, building narrative tension and explaining how time moves for the character.

As Francine Prose writes in the forward of this book, “[Jackson] writes brilliantly about consciousness—how the mind reacts to, adjusts, embraces, or recoils from experience.”

In this case, Natalie’s struggle to connect with other people affects the way she experiences time (and space). As the seconds stretch out between the knock at the door and Natalie moving across the room to answer it, we sense her imagination spiraling out, stalling, and slowing time to a sluggish pace.

This scene reminds me of moments in my own life where I freeze and time ticks on. When I’ve said something insensitive and I’m waiting for the rebuttal. When I’m opening an email that may inform the near or distant future of my life. When I’m watching a loved one walk through a dangerous situation.

Time is much more elastic than we realize, a fact that great fiction captures and even grapples with. I’d love to know how reading alters time for you. Is there another pastime/activity that has the same effect on you? LMK!

Reading as Chaotic Time Travel 🕰️

Time slows down and speeds up. Crackles. Implodes. Explodes.

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