Hector and the Search for Lost Time

by Francois Lelord

  While he was walking, Hector noticed something odd: the faster he walked up the corridor, the more the train slowed down, and the slower the countryside rolled by. He even had time to catch a glimpse of a pretty farm girl rounding up some nice sheep in the setting sun. If Hector stopped walking altogether to get a better view, the train would speed up, which was a little annoying. So he started running to make the train slow down even more. He ran so fast that eventually the train stopped altogether. But that wasn’t such a good thing, since Hector noticed that the landscape outside had become a snowy, icy wilderness, as if the train had arrived at the North Pole. He stopped running so that the train would move off again and get away from this icy and desolate place.

  But the train didn’t move.

  Ice began to creep up all the windows.

  Very far away, at the other end of the train, Hector heard a door bang and realised that someone or something had just boarded the train. Footsteps . . . very heavy, very slow . . . were approaching the carriage he was in.

  Hector desperately wanted to get off the train, but, the thing was, he couldn’t find a door that led outside! He wanted to open one of the windows in the carriage, but all the ones he tried were frozen solid by the ice outside.

  In his dream, Hector started wishing he would wake up right away as the footsteps slowly approached his carriage.

  Eventually, the train began to move off again, and then went faster and faster, and the nice countryside appeared again. This time, Hector didn’t see anyone at all, as if everyone, cows and sheep included, had gone in for the night at the same time as the sun. The only thing he saw was a happy-looking husky bounding along a path.

  Hector carried on gazing at the countryside in the setting sun. Suddenly, he wasn’t afraid of the footsteps approaching his carriage any more.

  The carriage door opened and Hector saw a young monk appear. Now, it wasn’t a monk from Hector’s country as you might think, but a monk like the ones from China, with a shaved head and wearing a sort of long orange robe which only covered one of his shoulders.

  The monk was young, but it was strange because Hector knew that he was actually a very old monk he’d already met in real life. Yet, in his dream, it seemed perfectly normal to him that the monk was very young.

  ‘So,’ said the old-monk-who-was-very-young, ‘how are things with you?’

  Then Hector woke up.

  Clara was sleeping beside him. He reached for his notebook and penlight (which meant that he could write without waking anyone up) and wrote down his dream. Hector didn’t usually write down his dreams, but he had a feeling that this one was important.

  HECTOR GOES TO TALK TO OLD FRANÇOIS

  HECTOR wanted to talk to someone about his dream so that he could understand what it meant a bit better. The first person he thought of was Clara, who sometimes had very good ideas, but he knew his dream was a little strange and might have worried her. Besides, since their last conversation, he thought Clara seemed quite sad. From time to time, she looked at herself in the mirror and seemed even sadder.

  He’d noticed a very pretty little blue and white jar on the bathroom shelf. On the top, it said ‘anti-ageing cream’. He’d told Clara that he thought she was very young to be using anti-ageing cream, but Clara had told him to mind his own business. So perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to tell her his dream, because he knew that it was about the passage of time.

  Then he thought of an old psychiatrist colleague called François, who was almost as old as his grandfather and always wore a bow tie. Hector thought that François must have listened to lots of people telling him their dreams in his years as a psychiatrist. He would probably have some good ideas about Hector’s.

  Old François worked in a big room which looked like an old-fashioned drawing room full of antique furniture and paintings. Even François looked old-fashioned in his bow tie, but Hector knew that he had some quite modern ideas.

  So he told him his dream. And he asked him what he made of it.

  Old François thought about it. Then he said, ‘The problem with dreams is that you never know if it’s just the brain jumbling up any old rubbish with snippets of memories to give itself something to do, or if, in fact, it’s trying to concoct a story which actually means something.’

  Hector was astonished – he remembered that old François had learnt psychiatry at a time when psychiatrists considered dreams to be very important.

  Old François saw that Hector was a little disappointed. So he said, ‘Of course, at one time, people used to think that a train in a dream symbolised sex . . . wanting to have sexual relations, or being afraid of having them, that sort of thing. But then this idea dates back to a time when having sexual relations was frowned upon in any case. Whereas now it’s the opposite . . .’

  Old François didn’t look as if he had much faith in these old ideas about sexual relations.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘your dream reminds me of what I learnt at school . . . about time. When you’re on a train and you throw a ball, someone who’s at rest in a meadow sees it travelling much faster than you do, since for him the train’s speed is added to the speed of the ball. It’s the same with light: if you send a flash of light along a train. But since light always travels at the same speed wherever you see it from, it means that speed . . . no, time . . . is not the same for you . . . no, for him . . . Oh, blast! I can’t really remember now. In the end, it all comes down to a question of relativity – you know, Einstein’s thing about time being different depending on the speed at which you’re travelling.’

  Hector vaguely remembered this too. This reminded him of what they say about a teacher and his pupils: the pupils hear half of what the teacher says, they understand half of what they hear, they remember half of what they understand, and they use half of what they remember, which is to say not much, as it turns out. Hector often saw teachers, both men and women, in his office, and often they were sad because they thought they weren’t doing any good. Hector tried to get them to change their minds by themselves. So he said to himself that he wouldn’t tell them what he and old François had managed to remember about relativity.

  But old François went on, ‘If you ask me, your dream is about time. Or, to be more precise, about fighting against the passage of time. The train is time, which no one can get away from, or slow down . . . Sadly, we know all too well what’s at the end of the line.’

  Old François was silent, and Hector got the feeling that he was thinking about it . . . the end of the line.

  ‘And the old-monk-who-was-very-young?’ asked Hector, just to stop old François thinking about the end of the line.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said old François. ‘We might say that he’s a reassuring presence for you. But he’s someone you’ve met, isn’t he?’

  It was true that one day when Hector had gone for a walk just to get away from it all in the beautiful green mountains over in China, he’d stumbled upon a Chinese monastery with a lovely curled rooftop and tiny square windows. That was where the old monk lived, surrounded by other younger monks, all of whom wore an orange robe over one shoulder, and nothing over the other. (It was almost as if they were practising not catching cold!) Hector hit it off straight away with the old monk, who was always in a good mood and could help people understand things without explaining them. The old monk had travelled a lot in his life – he’d even been to Hector’s country when he was just a boy, and had done the washing up in a restaurant where Hector still went to have lunch with his father from time to time. From the very first moment they met, Hector and the old monk had enjoyed talking to each other. The old monk had helped Hector understand two or three things about life (without explaining them, of course), and Hector had used this to help his patients. Since then, the old monk and Hector had stayed friends, even if they didn’t see each other very often.

  Anyway, He
ctor agreed with old François: his dream did have something to do with time going by. And in his dream he’d tried to stop it, like Marie-Agnès or Clara, but that hadn’t turned out very well. Then he’d tried to run away from it by getting off the train, but he couldn’t.

  Of course, the best thing would have been to go and tell the old monk his dream, but for a while now, whenever Hector sent him a message over the internet, there had been no reply. He thought that perhaps the old monk had reached the end of the line, and that made him sad.

  But he tried not to feel sad, because that in itself was one of the things the old monk had tried to help him understand: feeling sad meant that you hadn’t really understood life properly.

  HECTOR DISCOVERS A BIG SECRET

  IT was around this time that Hector noticed that quite a few of his colleagues didn’t have any grey hair at all, even those who were clearly older than him. He wondered if this was a big secret he’d just found out – psychiatrists never get old! But right after making this extraordinary discovery he heard one nurse say to another, ‘The new consultant should change hairdressers – it’s far too obvious he dyes his hair.’ Hector remembered a time when he was a little boy when men who dyed their hair were rather frowned upon. People thought they were men who loved men – at that time, people poked a lot of fun at that sort of love, and pretty nastily at that – or else, irresponsible men who still wanted to whisper sweet nothings at an age when they’d have been better off looking after their family and celebrating the birth of their grandchildren. But Hector said to himself that those days were well and truly over. Nowadays, fine upstanding men, even psychiatrists, and that says it all, dyed their hair to cover up the first snowfalls that had begun to turn their peaks white. (If you like this kind of poetic imagery, we’ll try to come up with some more for you.) He knew that these same colleagues also did everything they could to stay looking young, like Marie-Agnès: regular workouts, plenty of fruit and vegetables, watching their weight, and taking supplements and supplements of other supplements. But most of them didn’t use face cream yet, at least not any particular type.

  On the other hand, old François kept his dazzling white hair just as it was. Hector told him what he had noticed about his colleagues’ hair. That meant that even psychiatrists had a problem with the passing of time!

  Old François smiled.

  ‘They’re still at the fighting stage,’ he said. ‘I’ve given up . . .’

  And yet Hector knew old François was still interested in love. He’d even bumped into him one night leaving a restaurant with a much younger woman who seemed very lovey-dovey. Hector wondered how old François managed to get women to forget his age and his white hair.

  ‘When I was between forty and fifty,’ said old François, ‘I appealed to young women who had unresolved issues with their fathers.’

  ‘And now?’ said Hector.

  ‘I still do,’ said old François. ‘They just have to have had an elderly father. Or else a complicated relationship with their grandfather. Of course, there are fewer of those.’

  Since old François seemed to be in quite good shape, Hector asked him if this was the secret to his eternal youth.

  ‘No,’ said old François. ‘Of course, every time a love affair begins, I suddenly feel very young. But every time it ends – obviously, there always comes a time when they finally see me for what I am: an old bloke on medication – then I feel much older . . .’

  Hector wanted to ask, ‘So why carry on?’ Of course, he didn’t say that. But old François guessed what he was thinking.

  ‘I’d like to achieve inner peace,’ said old François. ‘Or think about nothing but my grandchildren. Or have faith, of course. But that grace hasn’t been bestowed on me. So now I read philosophy.’

  And he showed Hector an enormous library filled with books. Hector recognised some authors’ names, like Aristotle, Seneca, Epictetus, St Augustine, Pascal, Heidegger, Bergson, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and quite a few others. (You can copy these down if you like so you won’t make any spelling mistakes.)

  ‘And does it help?’ asked Hector.

  ‘It passes the time!’ old François said, laughing. ‘If you like, I’ll write a few summaries for you . . . well, my interpretation of them, anyway.’

  Hector thought this was a very good idea, because just the thought of reading all those books himself was making him feel a bit tired, and he was sure that old François would have some interesting things to say about philosophers. But, even so, there were some things he wanted to know right away.

  ‘What questions do philosophers generally think about?’

  ‘First of all, they try to define what time is. And it’s not easy, because you can’t see time and you can’t touch it. At the same time, you can’t get away from it. “What is time? If no one asks me, I know; if you ask me, I do not know.” That’s St Augustine.’

  ‘How very true,’ said Hector.

  ‘And Pascal, a philosopher who also invented the first mechanical calculator, said that it’s useless to define time, since everyone understands it, and if we try to define it we just end up going round and round in circles.’

  ‘I think I’d agree with that,’ said Hector.

  ‘But, even so, there is a definition I like . . . “Time is the number of movement with respect to before and after.” That’s Aristotle.’

  ‘Sorry, what?’ said Hector.

  He was beginning to find philosophy a bit complicated.

  ‘No, really, it’s very simple. You just need to define “number”. In fact, Aristotle makes a distinction between what is measuring time, the “numberer” if you will, like the seconds your watch measures (which are all the same) and the thing that’s being measured, what happens to you in your life, and Aristotle calls that the “numbered” . . . the seconds of your life. You’d agree that the seconds on your watch, the numberer, are all the same. One second is always the same as the next. But when it comes to the numbered, the seconds of your life – one second of happiness, one second of unhappiness, one second of boredom – they’re never the same . . .’

  Just then, the telephone on the desk rang. It was his secretary.

  ‘Blast,’ said old François, ‘I’ve left a patient waiting in the waiting room!’

  When he was leaving old François’s office, Hector had several new ideas. He quickly took out his notebook to jot down:

  Time Exercise No. 6: Write down everything that makes you feel younger. Then write down everything that makes you feel older.

  Hector thought to himself that for old François the answer to both questions was the same: love. Then he also remembered what he’d said about faith: ‘That grace hasn’t been bestowed on me.’ It was strange. Usually, it was the good Lord who bestowed grace. So, it was as if old François thought there was a God who hadn’t given him the grace to believe in Him!

  Time Exercise No. 7: If you don’t believe in the good Lord, imagine you do. If you do believe in Him, imagine you no longer believe. Note how this affects your view of time going by.

  Then Hector said to himself that, even if philosophers had trouble defining time, that shouldn’t stop others trying, because even if you didn’t manage it, it made you think about things.

  Time Exercise No. 8: Play a game with some friends. Try to find a definition of time. First prize: a watch.

  Hector knew that all these little exercises revolved around one question: is it better to fight against time, to slow it down by trying to act as if you were still young, to act as if time wasn’t passing, or rather accept that it is passing, that you can’t do anything about it, and that you’d be better off thinking about something else? Or a little of everything all at once? Is it better to live as if you were going to live for ever, or to think that you might die tomorrow, or, at any rate, in the not too distant future?

&
nbsp; More and more, Hector felt that if he could find answers to these questions, it would help a lot of people, almost as much as anti-ageing cream and supplements of other supplements.

  As always when he’d begun to puzzle over something without finding a solution, Hector had the same impulse: to go on a journey.

  That’s all very well, said Hector to himself, but where do I start?

  HECTOR AND THE OLD MONK

  THE next day, in his office, Hector picked up his newspaper to read in peace, because one of his patients had cancelled their session. (When you’re a psychiatrist and one of your patients cancels a session, it’s a bit like when you’re at school and one of your teachers is ill: you get a free period.)

  Suddenly, he jumped. What was that picture he’d just seen on the front page of the newspaper? The old monk laughing with his orange robe over his shoulder! Hector was very happy: if there was a story about the old monk on the front page with a photo of him laughing, then he must still be alive! Then he read the story.

  The old monk had disappeared, and everyone was arguing.

  People from different countries all over the world were accusing China of having made him disappear, because the old monk had already had problems in the past with the people who ruled China. He didn’t think like them. As a result, he’d spent quite a long time in rather cold prisons in order to learn how to think in the right way, which is to say, in exactly the same way as the people who ruled China at that time. But, since he hadn’t succeeded (he hadn’t tried very hard), they’d kept him locked up for many years. But all that was a long time ago and, anyway, China had changed since then, and the important people in China these days said that if the old monk had disappeared they had nothing to do with it. The other countries said that it was China’s fault, and perhaps they had everything to do with it! This had started a big row between all the countries in the world: important people said unkind things to each other in big meetings with microphones, and it was quite funny to look at the picture of the old monk laughing as if he’d just played a great trick on everyone. Of course, straight away, Hector thought of only one thing: finding the old monk. First of all, because he was worried. He wanted to know what had happened to him . . . perhaps the old monk needed some help. And then, because Hector thought that the old monk, with all his wisdom and experience, would be bound to have something very important to tell him about the passage of time. So he sent a message over the internet to one of his friends who also knew the old monk: Édouard.