Why does time feel different when we’re enjoying ourselves?

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German thinker who gave a series of lectures that he turned into a book of essays called The Relevance of the Beautiful. Part of what he does in that book is criticise the way modern life tends to turn time into a sort of empty container: an empty container that you have to keep filling up with purposeful activity. You’ll hear people talk about spending time, killing time, saving time, and they all treat every minute and every second as a kind of currency that you have to account for as you fill up the container.

In the book he contrasts what he calls calculative time with the time of the festival, or the time of a genuine encounter with a piece of art. He says “the calculating way in which we normally manage and dispose of our time is, as it were, brought to a standstill.” In those moments when you get yourself off the treadmill of calculative time, you’re in a different mindset completely. You’re in the time of the festival, and that time has its own autonomous, self-fulfilling quality. The festival fulfils every moment of its duration: it offers time, arresting it and allowing it to tarry.

That word tarry is a cracker. It comes from the German verb verweilen, usually translated as tarrying, lingering or dwelling. It describes a mode of staying with something, rather than trying to consume it as quickly as possible, get it boxed off, put it in the container and tick it off like another thing on your to-do list.

He gives the classic example, one of Heidegger’s scenarios. Imagine you’re waiting for your train and it’s been delayed, say by forty minutes. You’re probably just pissed off and impatient, stood on the platform scrolling your phone, and you just want that time to be over. You want to get where you’re going as quickly as possible. When you tarry, however, Gadamer says, it’s a totally different vibe: the present moment is enough on its own. On the platform the time feels empty, almost agonisingly empty. Tarrying is this sense that the present moment is enough. It doesn’t have to justify where it’s getting to. It’s self-sufficient in that way.

When it comes to art in particular, he talks about a kind of receptive, expectant openness, where the artwork you’re looking at might disclose its own temporal rhythm. It marches to the beat of its own drum, if you like. Your attention becomes a staying with, rather than a trying to get away from and get out of.

So he thinks learning to linger in that way, without an exit strategy, learning to tarry (let’s make tarrying great again, let’s make it something people enjoy and are able to do), is one of the only real ways you can become a genuinely free human being: getting off that treadmill of calculative time, and being able to tarry a little bit more.

Lightly tidied for reading. The quotations are from the translations named below.