Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 ‘Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases’
- 2 Flashes in the dark: first memories
- 3 Smell and memory
- 4 Yesterday's record
- 5 The inner flashbulb
- 6 ‘Why do we remember forwards and not backwards?’
- 7 The absolute memories of Funes and Sherashevsky
- 8 The advantages of a defect: the savant syndrome
- 9 The memory of a grandmaster: a conversation with Ton Sijbrands
- 10 Trauma and memory: the Demjanjuk case
- 11 Richard and Anna Wagner: forty-five years of married life
- 12 ‘In oval mirrors we drive around’: on experiencing a sense of déjà vu
- 13 Reminiscences
- 14 Why life speeds up as you get older
- 15 Forgetting
- 16 ‘I saw my life flash before me’
- 17 From memory – Portrait with Still Life
- Bibliography
- Index of names
14 - Why life speeds up as you get older
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 ‘Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases’
- 2 Flashes in the dark: first memories
- 3 Smell and memory
- 4 Yesterday's record
- 5 The inner flashbulb
- 6 ‘Why do we remember forwards and not backwards?’
- 7 The absolute memories of Funes and Sherashevsky
- 8 The advantages of a defect: the savant syndrome
- 9 The memory of a grandmaster: a conversation with Ton Sijbrands
- 10 Trauma and memory: the Demjanjuk case
- 11 Richard and Anna Wagner: forty-five years of married life
- 12 ‘In oval mirrors we drive around’: on experiencing a sense of déjà vu
- 13 Reminiscences
- 14 Why life speeds up as you get older
- 15 Forgetting
- 16 ‘I saw my life flash before me’
- 17 From memory – Portrait with Still Life
- Bibliography
- Index of names
Summary
Ernst Jünger is sitting in his study. It is late in the evening, almost nighttime. He is working on the manuscript of his study of time, Das Sanduhrbuch (The hourglass book). On the desk in front of him is an antique hourglass, a present from his late lamented friend Klaus Valentiner, who disappeared in Russia during the Second World War. The hourglass is set in simple wrought iron. It must have had a great deal of use: at the waist the glass has been scoured to an opaline finish. Jünger watches as a funnel-shaped hole appears in the upper bulb while a cone grows in the lower bulb under the velvet stream of soundlessly falling sand. It is not a comforting thought, he reflects, that though time slips by it does not stop. For what vanishes from above piles up a new supply below. Every time the glass is turned upside down the reservoir of available time is restored – you have only to stretch out your arm. But no matter how often you can tap the new supply, time passes more and more quickly. In hourglasses the grains of sand increasingly rub one another smooth until finally they flow almost without friction from one bulb into the other, polishing the neck wider all the time. The older an hourglass the more quickly it runs. Unnoticed, the hourglass measures out ever shorter hours.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Why Life Speeds Up As You Get OlderHow Memory Shapes our Past, pp. 201 - 225Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012