The world is old because its history is made up of successive childhoods and of their impressions.Your hours when you were six were the enormous hours of the mind that has little experience and constant and quick forgetfulness.Therefore when your mother's visitor held you so long at his knee, while he talked to her the excited gibberish of the grown-up, he little thought what he forced upon you; what the things he called minutes really were, measured by a mind unused; what passive and then what desperate weariness he held you to by his slightly gesticulating hands that pressed some absent-minded caress, rated by you at its right value, in the pauses of his anecdotes.You, meanwhile, were infinitely tired of watching the play of his conversing moustache.
Indeed, the contrast of the length of contemporary time (this pleonasm is inevitable) is no small mystery, and the world has never had the wit fully to confess it.
You remembered poignantly the special and singular duration of some such space as your elders, perhaps, called half-an-hour--so poignantly that you spoke of it to your sister, not exactly with emotion, but still as a dreadful fact of life.You had better instinct than to complain of it to the talkative, easy-living, occupied people, who had the management of the world in their hands--your seniors.You remembered the duration of some such separate half-hour so well that you have in fact remembered it until now, and so now, of course, will never forget it.
As to the length of Beethoven, experienced by you on duty in the drawing room, it would be curious to know whether it was really something greater than Beethoven had any idea of.You sat and listened, and tried to fix a passage in your mind as a kind of half-way mark, with the deliberate provident intention of helping yourself through the time during a future hearing; for you knew too well that you would have to bear it all again.You could not do the same with sermons, because, though even more fatiguing, they were more or less different each time.
While your elders passed over some particularly tedious piece of road--and a very tedious piece of road existed within short distance of every house you lived in or stayed in--in their usual state of partial absence of mind, you, on the contrary, perceived every inch of it.As to the length of a bad night, or of a mere time of wakefulness at night, adult words do not measure it; they hardly measure the time of merely waiting for sleep in childhood.
Moreover, you were tired of other things, apart from the duration of time--the names of streets, the names of tradesmen, especially the fournisseurs of the household, who lived in them.
You were bored by people.It did not occur to you to be tired of those of your own immediate family, for you loved them immemorially.
