Clocks and Perceptions

"How can he be that old?!" is a strange and universal question

The New Yorker cartoonist George Booth died recently. He was ninety-six. You may not know the name, but if you’ve spent any time with the New Yorker over the years, you know his work. As the New Yorker’s art director said, “if you can’t recognize a Booth cartoon, you need the magazine in Braille.”

A small note in Booth’s obituary in The New York Times made me sit up and lean forward: Booth joined the Marines after graduating from high school. In 1944.

The reason this jolted me is an experience I had in 1998.

That year, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the First World War, a contingent of Canadian veterans travelled to France. In Arras, the town where the Canadian army mustered in preparation for its attack on Vimy Ridge in 1917, the veterans attended a concert. The next day, there was an official ceremony at the soaring Vimy monument. I was a journalist with the Ottawa Citizen then and I interviewed several of the veterans in Arras. One man had been on the staff of Sir Arthur Currie and stood in the town square of Mons, mobbed by happy Belgians, when the 11th hour of the 11th day struck. I remember another had eyes of vivid blue that were rimmed with pink and watery, as the eyes of the very old often are. It felt like looking into the eyes of a time traveller. Or the wells of history.

The men I spoke to in 1998 were all in their late nineties or older. The youngest was the same age as George Booth when he died. Ninety-six.

In my mind, that is the natural order of things: Extremely old men are First World War veterans or their contemporaries. Veterans of the Second World War are a generation younger.

But this week I read that George Booth, Second World War veteran, who graduated from high school in 1944, died at the age of ninety-six. It was jarring. It shouldn’t have been. But it was.

Gettysburg veterans meet in 1913.

Our perceptions of time are odd.

If First World War veterans are in their late-nineties or older, and almost twenty-five years go by, well, the math isn’t hard. Same for Second World War veterans in their seventies and eighties.

The end of each year is marked with noisy celebration. The passage of the years should be hard to miss. And perceptions should update smoothly. Time moves along at the same steady pace as always. It doesn’t sneak up on anyone. It should never surprise us.

But that’s not how we perceive time. We associate people and places with an age, or an era, and the association sticks. Instead of the perception gradually updating as time gradually passes, it doesn’t budge — until someone says something, or you read an obit in the newspaper, and perception collides with clock.

Maybe you hear that Matthew Perry — aka Chandler Byng — is fifty-three years old. You say, “how on earth can Matthew Perry be fifty-three?!” It’s a bizarre question, of course. Matthew Perry got to be fifty-three the same way as the rest of us, one year at a time. But whether it’s about Matthew Perry or someone else, we’ve all asked that same, dumb question. Because we’ve all experienced the jarring sensation when we realize how far out of whack our perceptions have become.

Now, that said, I am obsessive about time and history. Always have been. I doubt many young people find old people as fascinating as I do (or did). Maybe I experience a sharper version of this phenomenon than others? I don’t know.

Let me ask you: Does this sound familiar? If so, tell me about a time when you experienced your own collision between perception and clock.