The Gift of Five Unnecessary Minutes

Gaston Bachelard was a philosopher of science, the kind of man who wrote serious books about how scientists correct their mistakes. He also wrote a whole book about fire, and the more you read him, the more you suspect he spent a lot of evenings staring into one.

What he noticed is that a fire gives you nothing to do. You can’t finish watching it. So the mind does something it rarely gets permission to do: it wanders, without quite leaving the room. He called this reverie, and he was careful to tell it apart from dreaming. In a dream you’ve gone. In reverie you’re still there, warm, half attending, letting one thought drift into the next.

He thought a good deal of what makes us happy begins there. The essence of being is well-being, he wrote. Most of us would call it wasting time.

Hans-Georg Gadamer lived to a hundred and two, which gives a person plenty of time to think about time.

Most of the time, he noticed, we treat it as something to fill. We have time for things, we make time, we find time, and when there’s nothing in it we’re bored. But some time isn’t like that. A festival doesn’t happen in the hours; it has a time of its own, and you don’t count it so much as live in it. He called this fulfilled time. And he had a lovely word for how we’re in it: tarrying. Staying with something because it keeps giving, not because you’re waiting for it to end.

Think of the evenings you remember. Nobody was checking the clock. That’s probably why they still feel close.

Ernst Bloch wrote a three-volume book about hope, much of it in exile, and on its very last page he arrives at one word: Heimat. It means home, but in German it carries more than that: the place you come from, the place you belong.

Bloch turns it round. Home, he says, isn’t behind us. It’s something that shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been.

We’ve all had glimpses of it: a lit window seen from a cold street, a kitchen on one particular evening, people you can be completely yourself with. Bloch thought those weren’t memories of somewhere we’ve lost so much as previews of somewhere we haven’t built yet. Which makes feeling homesick a rather hopeful thing to feel.