I Love The Passing of Time

Home, freedom, and Solvej Balle

Detail from Giorgio de Chirico’s The Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (1914)

I can’t say for sure whether the internet exists in the world of Danish author Solvej Balle’s acclaimed, Groundhog Day-esque novella series, On The Calculation of Volume. When the series narrator, an antique book collector named Tara living with her husband in a French seaside town, finds that she is endlessly repeating the 18th of November with no one but herself the wiser, she does not open her phone to see if the world’s events are likewise stuck in a loop. As she wanders her town, stalking her husband and memorizing the stars, flowers, and late autumn clouds of the 18th of November, she never looks at Instagram or Twitter to see if anyone else has noticed that they, too, are reliving the same day as the one before. While she references cell towers, memory sticks, and desktops, Tara is isolated in her world of the 18th of November as it repeats hundreds and hundreds of times, erasing any memory her husband or anyone else may have formed about her own activities or her own words. “I have not found a way out of the eighteenth of November,” she tells the reader, “but I have found roads and paths through the day, narrow passages and tunnels I can move along. I cannot get out, but I can find ways in.”

Her only attachment to the passage of time becomes her own memory, a journal that follows her unbound by the metaphysics of the rest of the 18th of November, and her consumption habits. She finds that when she buys food from the supermarket on one 18th of November, it doesn’t reappear on the next 18th of November. As she repeats the day over and over, consumption is the only impact she has on the world. While her husband Thomas becomes a “ghost,” removed from her own experience of time, Tara becomes a “monster,” swallowing the world around her and only defined by what she must take from the world to continue her placid, grey existence on the 18th of November.

In desperation for change and fluidity, she travels to Paris only to find herself drifting completely apart from the crowds of the city and her existence as a bookseller:

“I walk the same streets, but borne along simply by routine and habit. In the past, I have always had good reason to be here. But now I feel superfluous. I walk around the city with no purpose other than my passage from day to day. I am merely a human being roaming the streets. Or maybe not a human being. Maybe more of an animal of some sort. Neither hunter nor hunted, neither hungry nor well-fed. Just a creature wandering up and down.”

I am humbled and terrified by how much of myself I see in Tara, given I am not trapped in the 18th of November but feel, all the same, as if time has flattened and the world has lost some dimension it previously had. Though Tara seemingly has no internet, I recognize the fog she lives in as very similar to the one induced by a career and a life spent online, consumed by dramas and narratives that never seem to appear in the physical world I inhabit when I leave my apartment. I can watch as the Supreme Court demolishes my civil rights, see videos of mass slaughter from around the globe, and read horror stories from prisons and detention centers, only to find the parks and trees and paths and cafes and bookstores and museums of DC are right where I left them. In the interest of not weighing down friends and family, I rarely bring these kinds of things up unless I’m asked about work, leaving me disconnected as the information of the world is packed into my head—like Tara’s memories of the many 18ths of November—but is completely removed from the people I know or the worlds I physically inhabit. This is an illusion, of course—those are not online dramas but material nightmares—but it is an illusion I find myself unable to escape from, perhaps intoxicated by, all the same.

I never considered myself a creature of habit or realized to what degree my sense of self and safety hinged on the repetitions of routines. I had a tumultuous upbringing without roots, have reinvented myself and my body, and have changed names, homes, and careers. But once I moved to DC seven years ago, I found myself desperate for my own bed, a simple lunch I can eat every day, a morning run that begins and ends at the same time even if its destinations and routes change: The Anacostia River wide and grey, the National Mall lush and green no matter the season, the brutalist office blocks austere and immovable and marble columns ancient and eternal. DC is the most “at home” I’ve ever felt, and that’s likely why I’ve continued to make it home even as friends have come and gone and the majesty of its monuments and history have long since lost their novelty. I’ve been wondering a lot lately if “home” and “stillness” necessarily need to mean the same thing, or if home can be the routines that keep me alive, the routes I run each morning.

Routine and route both come from the Old French word for rute, which itself comes from the Latin rupta, meaning the words for predictability and passage share a lineage with rupture. The patterns of one’s life are often sculpted from the bramble and disorder of the world, the same way a trail is carved through the woods by force, repetition, and erosion. I have the good fortune of stability at a time that is a scarce resource, something that must be fought for and protected as supports are destroyed, words are censored, and people are vanished to unspeakable places. A flood, a deportation, a life torn asunder by the brute force of a bomb or the violence of the law—how many find themselves uprooted entirely from what they’ve always known, denied the cycles and predictability that make up a home or, at least, make one’s life legible?

When, on the first 18th of November, Tara accidentally burns her hand on a space heater, it heals with each passing 18th of November. She notices her hair grows long and, as her journey through the 18th of November deepens, that she even appears to be physically aging—all while the world around her remains unchanged and her husband or friends make no note of it. Her body moves forward through time without the world it depends on. The book makes no note of her reproductive cycles or even if she’s cisgender; She has no children, and her husband exists on the periphery of both the novel and her attention.

When, through will or circumstances, a woman paves her own path apart from the expected milestones society so frequently pretends is the inevitable result of her biology—when they delay or forego children, take birth control medications to free themselves of their periods, or change their sex altogether—it frees them to define their own life seasons. But at the same time that she is judged for failing to conform to that path, a woman is judged for exhibiting the symptoms of time—the lines in her face, the reshaping of her body. Queer life is also frequently unmoored from the traditional trappings that most people use to define maturity, success, and a life well-lived. Read enough queer theory and you’ll find the words “temporality” and “futurity” to describe the ways our freedom challenges the “linear” path through life, the ways timeliness itself is defined along a straight edge, and queer life is deemed timeless, timefree.

After the 365th consecutive 18th of November, Tara finds herself desperate for seasons other than the brisk clouds of the 18th of November. She visits her family home and, though it is still only the 18th of November, urges her parents to cook Christmas dinner, open gifts, and simulate the Christmas that came to define “Christmas” for her as a child. She takes a train to Norway, where November will give her snow, ice, and the chills of winter. She leaves for Cornwall to experience spring, eat spring vegetables, count spring flowers, and marvel at young lambs prancing in the green fields. In southern Spain, she spends a “summer” dancing with strangers in clubs and feels the heat of desire on her exposed skin. These are props, constructions, manufactured memories—yet the fact of the world turning is so essential to her sense of self that she traverses the globe while it stays still, emulating movement even though she knows she is frozen.

I once took a college class on developmental psychology where the professor compared the child growing less dependent on their mother to a comet let loose from a star, rotating in the orbit but wider and wider with each rotation. It is easy to imagine, particularly from queer perspectives, that home and freedom are opposing ideas, that home means stillness and freedom means movement. Yet both are contingent on the other—freedom without a home is just displacement, and home without freedom is just a prison. Home is not the act of staying in the same place, but the comfort in knowing you can return, that you can grow and be rooted at the same time.

“Human beings have roots by their real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community,” writes Simone Weil, “which preserves in living shape particular treasures of the past and particular expectations for the future.” Our sense of home is built from our past and towards our future. Our grasp on our own sense of belonging and security is dependent upon narratives which, by definition, include a beginning, middle, and end. I often find myself like Tara, trying in vain to satisfy my need for narrative with the simulacra of a life either online or in my head, creating seasons where there are none. Alienated from time—by constant distraction, floods of information, political and personal despair, or isolation from those around us—I am left astray, my selfhood reduced to what I take from the world. But I also take for granted the reliability of the world I’ve created for myself—the routines I can count on, the routes I can run knowing the home they’ll end at.