They say time flies when you’re having fun.
I don’t know who “they” are, but let’s assume they’re right, and the opposite is true. Time DOESN’T fly when you’re not having fun. In a general sense, the pandemic has been anything but fun for most of us, with all of the cancelled plans and overall feeling of isolation. So why is it that March 2020 simultaneously feels like it just happened, and like it happened 20 years ago? (This interpretation is based both on my own experience and the consensus of the other UCL students I’m sitting next to right now.) Interestingly enough, research from John Moores University seems to agree: perception of time has been changing for most people during COVID, but the stretching versus compressing seems to occur on an individual basis (3).
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” deals with time in a layered way (1). There are three clear indicators: the half-hour it takes to die of the disease that the rich are hiding from, the several months of siege that they undergo before they face their fates, and most importantly, the hourly chiming of the ebony clock. To me, it seems like they undergo several states of time that correspond to each symbol. The first five or six months of partying are glossed over. They find fun things to do, presumably, but everything blurs together and in hindsight, the time spent was forgettable. The thirty minutes are reconciled at the end, where the death sweeps the partygoers quickly and effectively, leaving no alternative but to succumb. The hours of the party, marked by the clock, are the reality that they feel in the moment, where every time they take a step towards timelessness, they are jarred sharply back to the hour that they exist in. It is arguably a sort of countdown, maybe not explicitly acknowledged as such, but the discomfort and pauses that follow each chime suggest some sort of awareness of the sheer weirdness of the situation.
I think much of the same could be said for the situation we find ourselves in, though perhaps not universally. The months are pretty obvious, that run into each other but are, at the same time filled with so many discrete events because of 2020’s propensity for world-altering events. I’m not sure how much I can speak for the half-hour time limit on the disease, because luckily, I don’t know anyone who has died of COVID, but reflecting on the soaring numbers of worldwide death, then space of time in which they happened is relatively small.
The hourly chimes are the most personally relatable aspect of the piece. Each time someone forgets the day or the month, which has become more common than ever in the climate of work/study from home, we get a little reality check, which is a far cry from the constant string of events and commitments most of us had to deal with before. It seems like the boredom stretches the time we perceive, interspersed with the miniscule recognitions of where we are in our temporal spaces (2). The time’s individual events that we remember, however, are compressed because there is some much monotonous sameness, and it seems like the only remedy is the escape from our crisis-insulated bubble, either by overcoming the virus, or by succumbing to it in an “incident of half an hour.”
References
- Poe E. Masque Of The Red Death, The. South Bend: Infomotions, Inc.; 2000.
- Lindberg S. Perception of Time Has Shifted During COVID-19, New Survey Reports [Internet]. Verywell Mind. 2021 [cited 12 March 2021]. Available from: https://www.verywellmind.com/why-time-is-passing-so-strangely-during-covid-5075438
- Pardes A. The Coronavirus Has Warped All Sense of Time [Internet]. Wired. 2021 [cited 12 March 2021]. Available from: https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-time-warp-what-day-is-it/