Excerpts from “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes
Excerpts from “The Sense of an Ending”
by Julian Barnes
We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing — until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
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Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don’t you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business. Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire — and desirability. You may go further and consider your own approaching death, which, despite what company you may muster, can only be faced alone. But this is all looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records — in words, sound, pictures — you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? “History is the certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” ...... Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history — even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
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But time...how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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I thought of what I couldn’t know or understand now, of all that couldn’t ever be known or understood.
I can’t even remember when I first read this book, but the lines “how time first grounds us and then confounds us…” And I think often as I’ve started to on my own life, and the last line in particular strikes me. His distinctions between being safe and being mature, how something can be one thing in one moment and utterly another in retrospect, the way the self hides and occludes things and how some things only make sense with the perspective that time and joy and grief can give, are so utterly beautiful.
Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape, 2011).
The Sense of an Ending is a short novel about a retired Englishman named Tony Webster who is forced to reconsider his early life when an unexpected legacy from a long-ago girlfriend's mother surfaces a buried piece of his history. The novel is, on one level, a mystery about what Tony did when he was twenty; on another level, it is a sustained meditation on the unreliability of memory, the construction of self-narrative across decades, and what time does to certainty.
