Is it wrong if the days feel long but the years feel short?
A short collection of thoughts on what a “good life” — however you define it — feels like
In the past year, the days have felt particularly long and the months have flown by particularly fast. I think this is an effect of working remotely and being at home and alone day after day — thank you, COVID. When each day is visually identical, your memories merge and blur.
But to say that blurriness is symptomatic of an un-good life is to argue against Annie Dillard’s description, which I’ve always liked. In the same book where she states, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Dillard says:
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by…Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur’s life a good one, or Thomas Mann’s?
Elsewhere in The Writing Life, she writes:
A schedule…is a net for catching days. It is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and…
