The Day That Mostly Does Not Happen
“Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS
This day does not exist most years. It is a correction, inserted because the earth takes slightly longer to go around the sun than our calendar admits, and every four years we settle the debt.
That makes it a good day to read Camus on time. He describes an ordinary moment. A man says he is thirty. He means it as a remark about his youth, and in the instant he says it something else has happened. He has placed himself on a line. He has conceded that a count is running and that he is somewhere along it.
Camus calls the recognition horror and calls time the worst enemy, which is stronger than most of us would put it. But he is naming a specific feeling, the one where a number attaches itself to you. Not death in the abstract. The arithmetic.
Today is that arithmetic made visible. The calendar is not a natural fact. It is a human system that does not quite fit, and once every four years the gap grows wide enough to see. Which makes this the day the count admits it is approximate.
Today, on a day that mostly does not happen, look at the number without flinching. Then spend the extra day as though it were a gift, which in a sense it is.
