24. Time passes
I
was very lucky at school. In the subjects that mattered to me, I had
some really good teachers. And by good, I mean they kept an orderly
classroom and shared their enthusiasm for their
subject supportively and with real skill.
I can still remember the day I was introduced – in an English
class – to the idea of time passing. We were discussing one of
the stories in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales – the Wife
of Bath, probably – and someone was complaining that the story
went right off the boil and followed an amusing but irrelevant digression.
The teacher took the point but argued – and I quote:
'It's a correlative for the passing of time.'
At the time I didn't realise what I had been told, but I looked it up and saw in a flash that it was true. The point of the digression wasn't in the digression at all. It was a way of passing some fictional time.
You see, just before the story drifted off down this pleasant side-stream,
in the main flow of the story a crisis had been
reached and overcome. The next major events were not to happen for some
years. Once the pleasant meander down the tributary was over and we
rejoined the main current, it was quite natural for us – as readers
– to accept the leap forward in time without all sorts of time-consuming
padding.
Neat, economical and effective.
