Hector and the Search for Lost Time

by Francois Lelord

  Time Exercise No. 21, thought Hector: If you want to look young, always stay in the shade (or in candlelight).

  But, as Hector knew that Paul didn’t like feeling as if he was wasting time, Hector thought he would write this exercise down later.

  ‘So,’ said Marie-Agnès, ‘what do you think?’

  Hector looked at the programme of the conference Paul had organised. It was called ‘Time on Our Side’. There were different speakers, all quite famous. They were going to talk about time, from their point of view of course. There was a philosopher with tousled hair, a monk from Hector’s religion, a big consultant for big companies who was an expert in time, a top biologist who was going to explain why we get old, and a racing driver who won by taking corners a few tenths of a second faster than his rivals.

  Then Paul was going to speak himself, since he was the one organising this big conference which lots of people from his big company had been invited to. And quite a few journalists too, or rather journalists’ bosses, because Paul really hoped people would talk about this conference and, as a result, about his big company.

  What did Paul’s big company make? All kinds of beauty creams, including the most famous anti-ageing cream, and also hair dye, and lots of products to make men and women all over the world look younger and more beautiful. Hundreds of researchers worked day in, day out mixing lots of ingredients in different-coloured test tubes in order to come up with better and better products.

  All the guests were staying in an old village very close to the temple. At one time, it had been an ordinary village with local people living there, but gradually it had become impossible to make a living from fishing, and the village had been deserted. Later, the locals who still lived on the island had done up the village to attract people from elsewhere, just like this conference. Before, they’d fished for seafood, now, they fished for tourists.

  ‘I think the programme looks very good,’ said Hector. ‘Different points of view . . . people won’t feel as if they’re wasting their time.’

  ‘They won’t, will they?’ said Paul with a relieved smile.

  A young woman dressed like Clara when she was going to work appeared, holding a bundle of new programmes over her head to shield her from the sun, and struggling over the stony path in her high heels. Paul checked that Hector’s name was indeed on the programme, and then the two of them started talking about the seating arrangements for dinner.

  ‘So, how about going for a walk?’ said Marie-Agnès, who was obviously thoroughly bored by these organisational issues.

  From the top of the hill where they were standing, there was a good view of the little fishing harbour which, for a long time, had provided a living for everyone on the island. There were still quite a few boats painted in cheerful colours, and Hector saw some fishermen unloading their fish, which shimmered in the sun. A little further away, old people were sitting on benches in the shade of the trees, watching children playing with a ball against the wall of the church.

  An island where the Kablunaks live like the Inuit, the shaman had said.

  Hector thought to himself that Clara would have liked it here.

  All the same, he wondered why the shaman had wanted him to come to this island, because, unlike the salmon which was one day going to end up on the buffet, Hector’s Being-in-the-world was both open to the future and beset by Concern, as the famous philosopher with the little moustache would have put it.

  HECTOR IS WORKING, EVEN BY THE SEA

  In the end, Marie-Agnès left Hector alone with Paul. They went to have a drink in the villa where Marie-Agnès and Paul were staying. The closed shutters let in a bit of sun and it cast a lovely light that would have made anyone look young.

  Hector felt like having a beer, but, as Paul had poured himself a glass of vegetable juice, he did the same. He also saw that Paul looked relieved to be alone with him.

  ‘Always put on a brave face . . .’ said Paul, sighing.

  With just a few questions, Hector put him at ease – after all, it was his job.

  And Paul told him quite quickly that he wasn’t feeling at all good. For nearly a week, he’d been having massive panic attacks every morning.

  ‘I normally get up very early and have my coffee while I think over my plans for the day. But there, facing the sea, I felt terrible, as if I was going to die. There I was, shaking, heart pounding in my chest, bathed in sweat and everything. But that’s nothing. I have the feeling that my life is getting away from me. That everything’s pointless. That time is ticking away, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and that I’m going . . . straight into the void.’

  Hector could see that just by talking about his panic attack Paul was working himself up into another one. Hector suggested that he lie down on the sofa for a minute and take deep breaths.

  Paul managed to calm himself down a little, and then he started talking again, looking up at the ceiling.

  ‘All my life, I’ve fought against time!’ said Paul. ‘I was quick at school. And later on I always measured myself against my colleagues of the same age. Which of us was going to be a general manager first? That’s the sort of question we’d ask ourselves. I was very proud of being a CEO at thirty-two. Then I ran bigger and bigger companies. Of course, I’ve been divorced twice. But, hey, my children are doing fine. The company went global . . . and everyone says it’s down to me. But the other morning . . .’

  ‘The other morning?’ asked Hector. (We’ll let you in on a psychiatrist trick: when people stop talking, repeat just the end of their last sentence.)

  ‘. . . I felt that all that was completely empty. Yes, I did that; I got there. But now I’m an old bloke who tries to believe, and make others believe, that he’s still young. What is the point of everything I’ve achieved, if right now I feel so awful? After all, if I hadn’t achieved all that, somebody else would more than likely have done just as well. In any case, the beauty market is booming, so whether it was me or somebody else it would have worked . . .’

  Hector knew that when people like Paul became modest, they weren’t far from very deep depression.

  ‘. . . The other morning, I felt as if my whole life had just been empty all along. And yet I thought it was very full. I’ve always wanted to fill time. Fill time! But I don’t believe in that any more . . . Even when you fill it, it still slips through your fingers. And off we go, off we go, straight into the void!’ said Paul, sitting bolt upright on the sofa, a little like someone who wants to jump from the car before it goes over the edge of the ravine.

  Hector said to himself that Paul needed to talk quite a lot, in several sittings, but before that he needed to get a bit better. So he gave him some little pills that he always carried around with him just in case. Some had pretty much the same thing in them as the ones he’d given to Fernand’s dog. (But Hector didn’t tell Paul that, of course.)

  Later, he wrote in his little notebook:

  Time Exercise No. 22: In your opinion, what is a very full life?

  HECTOR GOES BACK TO SCHOOL

  AND so the conference began.

  Paul had expected Hector to speak in the morning, but Hector explained to him that psychiatrists were rarely at their best in the morning (otherwise, they would have become surgeons). So he was only going to speak at the end of the third day, just before dinner.

  Everyone – a good hundred people, Hector reckoned – was sitting on the stone seats of an amphitheatre as old as the temple. Luckily, the seats had been covered with lovely blue cushions that were very comfortable. Above them, a big blue and white awning shielded them from the sun, and local women in blue dresses and white aprons often brought refreshments.

  In a way, it was lucky that old François wasn’t there, thought Hector, because in the different countries around the world where they’d been to conferences Hector had noticed that his old colleag
ue always had a soft spot for the pretty local waitresses who weren’t aware how beautiful they were. And here he noticed a few of those, and also some pretty journalists or journalists’ bosses.

  We’re not going to tell you every little thing about the conference, because that would be a bit boring. Hector was rather bored himself, a bit like when he was at school trying to listen to his teachers. And yet he knew it was interesting, but that’s the way it was – he liked listening to people telling him their life stories, but when it came to lectures he’d rather read them, not listen to them.

  ‘You don’t seem all that interested in this,’ said Marie-Agnès, who was sitting beside him.

  ‘Of course I am,’ said Hector.

  To help himself concentrate, he decided to write down the most interesting things in his little notebook. Here are his notes.

  The philosopher

  Very complicated. But some interesting questions. Is time like space? Both were created by God at the same time as the world. Leibniz, for example, thought this, but Newton considered time to be an attribute of God, that, like Him, had always existed. They argued about this, and Newton was quite mean. Or are time and space just ideas invented by man to make sense of the world in his own way? For Kant or Spinoza, time only exists through us. So time wouldn’t exist without us to feel it or measure it? If you ask me, it did exist before us, because otherwise how would we have had time to come into being? On this point, I think I’d agree more with Aristotle and Hobbes, less with St Augustine and Kant, but I’ve already sort of forgotten what they said.

  Lots of philosophers from the last century thought very hard about this problem: it takes time to be, and if time didn’t exist we wouldn’t have the time to be. And as soon as we come into being then there’s time. And so, for some people, being and time were one and the same, and they’d write whole books to explain why. Heidegger (little moustache), Sartre (big round glasses). Philosophy is all well and good, but it’s a little like maths: you need to work at it every day to appreciate it. And take up German. Shame no one talked about the theory of relativity – they should have invited an expert in stars like Hubert. Mention this to Paul for next time.

  Beside him, he saw Marie-Agnès was having a little snooze, and it reminded him that philosophers were mostly men. Or else the women who were philosophers often questioned not what was true or false, but what was good or bad for people. And therefore for babies, when it came down to it.

  The time expert for big companies

  Too simple. His big thing: telling the difference between what’s urgent and what’s important. Important and urgent: do it straight away. Important and not urgent: think about it a little every day. Urgent and not important: give it to someone else. Not important and not urgent: toss it overboard as quickly as possible. Very happy to say that, with today’s means of communication, everything goes everywhere faster, but he’s forgetting that we could have said the same thing before, when people learnt to ride horses or when the telephone was invented. Likes saying words like ‘instantaneity’, ‘hypertime’ and ‘world-time’.

  A woman asked the time expert a question, wondering if all these devices which allowed people to speak to each other, write to each other and even see each other at any time anywhere in the world weren’t going to put an end to time for thinking things over.

  ‘Not at all,’ said the time expert with a big smile. ‘Quite the opposite . . . by working faster, we free up time for ourselves!’

  Hector wasn’t so sure. He remembered Clara constantly checking her mobile phone or her internet messages, even at weekends.

  Marie-Agnès also asked a question.

  ‘This urgent-important thing of yours is interesting,’ she said. ‘But when you say urgent or important, urgent or important for who? Me? My boss? God?’

  ‘I don’t know about God,’ said the time expert, laughing. ‘It’s up to you to define your own priorities.’

  Hector told himself that he wasn’t going to leave Marie-Agnès to ask all the questions by herself. He wanted to give her the impression that she’d been right to get Paul to invite him.

  By seeing patients who talked to him about their jobs and also friends who worked a little like Clara, he’d ended up with a pretty good idea of how people decided what was urgent and what was important, and also of the men and women it worked for best.

  He raised his finger and was handed the microphone. He explained that at work, for example, it was important to tell the difference between three kinds of important things: firstly, things that are important for doing your job well; secondly, things that are important for your boss; and, thirdly, those that are important for your career.

  ‘In an ideal world,’ said Hector, ‘they should be exactly the same!’

  This made everyone laugh: people knew all too well that they didn’t live in an ideal world! Hector had often noticed that people who put ‘job done well’ first were generally rewarded less than those who put ‘important for my boss’ first, or ‘important for my career’. Then these conscientious people often got really down because they hadn’t been rewarded, and yet they felt they had done their job well. Hector helped them think about other priorities: what was important for their boss or their career. As to their boss, they also had to work out what was the most important thing for him: doing his job well, his own boss or his career. Then you could also try to work out how your boss’s boss thought, but that got a bit complicated, like the theory of relativity.

  ‘But,’ somebody said, ‘I don’t really understand the difference between important for my career and important for my boss, since it’s my boss who decides my career.’

  ‘Not just your boss,’ said Hector.

  For your career, you had to spend a little time getting to know other bosses besides your own, keep up with what was happening elsewhere, make friends and learn new things that would be useful later on.

  ‘Like learning Chinese,’ somebody piped up.

  Hector was pleased, because people looked as if they’d found his little remarks interesting.

  While they were waiting for the biologist who was going to explain why we get old, Hector took out his little notebook.

  Time Exercise No. 23: Draw up a nice table with four boxes: Urgent-Important, Urgent-Not important, Not Urgent-Important, Not urgent-Not important. Put everything you have to do into these boxes. Are you any further forward?

  Afterwards, he felt quite pleased to add his own little exercise:

  Time Exercise No. 24: Sort out everything you have to do into ‘important for doing your job well’, ‘important for your boss’ and ‘important for your career’. How much time do you spend on each of the three?

  Suddenly, it occurred to Hector that you could also apply this to family life.

  Time Exercise No. 24(B): Work out how much time you spend doing important things for your children, for your partner and for yourself. Show the rest of your family the results.

  He was aware that this was rather a dangerous exercise to do for harmony at home, and thought that he wouldn’t recommend it to everyone.

  After that, he began to get a bit bored again, but luckily the biologist had come up on stage. He was a tall, serious-looking chap, and Hector thought he was bound to have some interesting things to say to explain why we get old, and how we can’t help it.

  HECTOR LEARNS WHY WE GET OLD

  The biologist

  Very interesting on all the reasons we get old. The most important: our cells constantly reproduce by dividing in two. But each time it’s a little like a photocopy of a photocopy: the copy isn’t quite as good. So each new generation of cells doesn’t work quite as well as the last. This means that little by little our body doesn’t work quite as well and we get old. And this never-ending photocopying of cells is controlled by the ends of our chromosomes, the telomeres. So if we co
uld control how telomeres behave, the photocopies would be perfect, the new cell would be identical to the last, and we’d never get old ever again; we’d stop at the age we’re at . . .

  ‘That’s brilliant!’ said Marie-Agnès.

  ‘We’re working on it,’ whispered Paul, who had come back to sit beside her.

  Hector felt a bit dizzy thinking about what would happen if we could control telomeres. People would swallow a pill and, hey presto, they’d stay the age they were at for ever. But for those who were very old already it wouldn’t be so funny. And for young people – what age should they decide to stop at? And, besides, who’d have access to these pills? Rich people first, most likely, who would live much longer than the poor, once again. Would this trigger wars? Being killed or dying in an accident would be a much greater tragedy than before, because your life would really be cut short by hundreds of years. Then would people perhaps become very, very fearful and never dare do anything a bit risky ever again? Wouldn’t we end up getting bored with living? And in a society where everyone was young, wouldn’t youth eventually lose its ephemeral and wonderful charm? And if no one died of old age any more, how would we feed all the babies that came into the world? Stop having babies? And if no one had children, what would that do to people? Wouldn’t they become very selfish, and so not as happy?

  We’ll know when we get there, thought Hector, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to get there. On the other hand, never seeing himself growing old with Clara . . .

  Just then, the biologist put up a slide.