And if that wasn’t enough? Well, there would always be time to think about that later.
HECTOR AND THE MAN WHO WANTED TO TURN BACK TIME
AHA, thought Hector, I feel a new idea coming on. He was listening to Hubert, who was an astronomer. He observed and listened to the stars with such expensive equipment that it took several different countries to pay for it all. Then Hubert and his colleagues did some very complicated calculations to work out how the world had begun a very long time ago. They even wondered what things were like before the world began, and even whether time existed back then.
Hubert had had a complete breakdown the day he realised that, as a result of spending all his time thinking about the stars, he hadn’t been paying enough attention to his wife, and she had left him for a man who did nothing much in life, but who was apparently quite funny. Hector was helping Hubert to understand that you shouldn’t dwell too much on the past. (It was a bit like the business with the beginning of the world: Hubert was spending all his time trying to understand how this business between his wife and this man had started.) Hector explained to Hubert that knowing whose fault it was wasn’t all that important. It would be better for Hubert to look to the future and try to take better care of the next nice woman he met, even if that meant that the next big theory of the beginning of the world was a little delayed.
But Hubert couldn’t let it go. ‘I wish I could go back in time, back to the time when she still loved me.’
When Hubert said ‘to the time when she still loved me’, he couldn’t stop tears welling up in his eyes. It was terribly sad.
‘Now, I’d know how to love her; I’d pay attention; I wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. If only I could go back …’
And yet, with his very complicated research on stars, Hubert of all people should have known that you can’t turn back time – or else it would completely change our understanding of the world and how it works. But, despite this, he didn’t stop thinking about it.
‘Anyway, Doctor, at our age, you really have to take stock of your life.’
Hector was startled – he thought he was a lot younger than Hubert. He didn’t say anything, but afterwards he checked Hubert’s date of birth. Sure enough, Hector was younger, but, as it turned out, not by that much.
Hector was a bit disappointed. The only idea Hubert had given him was that he wasn’t exactly a young psychiatrist any more, and he already knew that anyway. The only difference was that now he actually felt it, and, as psychiatrists well know, when it comes to knowing and feeling, it’s feeling that’s important.
In the end, Hubert did give Hector another idea.
Time Exercise No. 4: Think of all the people and things you are not paying enough attention to now, because one day they will be gone and then it will be too late.
HECTOR AND THE LADY WHO WANTED TO STAY YOUNG
THE patient just after Hubert was Marie-Agnès, a rather charming young woman who had a tendency to change boyfriends as soon as they fell in love with her. As a result, Hector had been her psychiatrist longer than she’d been with any of her boyfriends. When you’re a psychiatrist, you mustn’t fall in love with your patients, even when they are your type. Marie-Agnès had begun to realise that all her friends were married, and that most of the men she was interested in were married too.
‘When I think of all the perfectly good men I broke up with when I was younger …’
‘Perhaps they weren’t right for you,’ said Hector.
‘Oh, but they were. Besides, when I see how they’ve turned out, I think to myself that I was an absolute idiot not to hold on to them.’
‘All of them?’
‘No, no! Just one.’
‘Do you think this might be a useful lesson for the future?’
‘The future? But, at my age, I’ve got much less choice. I think my future will always be worse than my past.’
‘If you want to live the same way in the future as you did in the past, maybe,’ said Hector.
‘Do you mean that at thirty-nine you can’t keep living like you did at twenty?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Ah, but still … twenty is the most wonderful time of your life.’
Hector thought that this wasn’t true for everyone, but it clearly was for Marie-Agnès.
‘Not having a care in the world, being free and able to choose any guy you want, not thinking about the passage of time, feeling that your life is never going to end … How I wish I could go back!’
‘You were saying a moment ago that you would take the opportunity to choose a good husband quickly,’ said Hector.
‘Well, there, I’m contradicting myself. Maybe I’d do the same thing all over again.’
‘Then why have any regrets?’ asked Hector.
‘I just miss that feeling that my life will never end … because I don’t have that feeling any more,’ said Marie-Agnès.
Hector had read studies on this. There’s a moment when your life seems to stretch out before you like an endless roll of fabric, from which you’ll be able to make all sorts of outfits. And then comes the moment when you realise that the roll does have an end, and that you’ll have to do some careful calculations if you’re going to manage to get even one more set of clothes out of it. (Don’t forget, you’ve known from the beginning that the roll has an end, but, once again, when it comes to knowing and feeling, it’s feeling that counts.) Depending on the person, this feeling that the roll has an end hits them somewhere between two and a half dogs and three. Psychiatrists call this a midlife crisis and it puts a lot of work their way.
‘By the way, Doctor, could you write me a prescription for my vitamins?’
Hector remembered that, even though Marie-Agnès couldn’t slow time down, she tried to slow down its effects on her at least. There were so many things she could try: there were vitamin supplements and supplements of other supplements of every colour imaginable, which she bought on the internet, and workouts three times a week with lots of aerobics. And it’s true that, as Hector sometimes noticed, she had a really stunning figure. Then, of course, there were fruit and vegetables at least four times a day (this made Marie-Agnès’s mother happy, since she could never get Marie-Agnès to eat her vegetables when she was little), no cigarettes at all any more, not much wine and only good fats (that’s to say, none which come from cows or pigs, another reason for not eating those good animals).
Above all, Marie-Agnès avoided sunbathing, because she knew it ages the skin, and she used at least three different sorts of face cream, depending on whether it was morning, night or during the day, and her night cream was called ‘anti-ageing’.
Hector thought all this was very good for her health, and would make Marie-Agnès look younger for longer, but it didn’t stop time passing.
As it was, Marie-Agnès must have thought the same thing sometimes, because one day she said to Hector, ‘When I see myself bouncing up and down in the mirror at the gym or I’m standing in front of all my beauty creams, sometimes I ask myself, what’s the point? Why not just finally let go … stop caring about all that. Basically, it’s a kind of slavery.’
A slave to wanting to stay young. Hector thought that was a very good