And then crash! The fairy-tale is over; and one finds oneself in a world in which men not only have feet of clay, but they also keep them on the ground. However, this in itself can be an exhilarating experience. But again one's ideas of time change. At best, we view time in terms of eternity, not necessarily in this world, but perhaps partly in this, partly in the invisible world after death, which so many people in every age have believed in. At worst we panic, and try vainly to lose ourselves again in the ever fleeing moment, cramming too much into too few hours.
Time does not change, of course. The clock ticks just the same however old we are. It is our awareness of time, and the passing of events, which changes. And the interesting question is - why does our awareness of time change? Why should we not be able, with a small effort of will, to recapture for hours at a time the child's sense of time, if we want to? Why do we seem to be the slave of the passing years?
I think the answer is that we are all overshadowed by the fear of death, in the same way that the parochially-minded man is overshadowed by his parochial-ness. If we could step outside this world, and be immortal for a moment, if we could see things for a moment with God's eyes, all mankind would look parochially-minded because each man everywhere would be overshadowed by the fear of death, consciously or unconsciously. We are in fact inside the world; and living in this world in which the almost invariable rule seems to be that life ends in death, we find it impossibly hard to imagine any other state of affairs existing.
Let me give an illustration. Many people, when they get behind the wheel of a car, drive as though nothing could happen to them. They do when they are young anyway. This assumption or belief is not true of course. 3,000 persons dead, and 300,000 persons injured on the roads of this country every…