LETTERS: PASSING OF TIME IS PROPORTIONAL

To the editor:

Everyone knows that the older you get, the faster time seems to pass. It is a psychological truism that when we are young, each day leading to Christmas can drag like a year. Then, as we round middle age, a whole summer seems compressed into a fleeting few days.

Last summer seemed to go even faster than ever -- just a bright blur between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Everyone I spoke with had the same impression. But, then, all of were a year older than we had been. I think that this telescopic quality of time can be explained as a matter of proportion, if we look at it arithmetically and not sentimentally.

Time actually does move faster for us as we increase in age. When we are young, say 8 years old, a year represents a full one-eighth of our total experience -- and even more than that, for few of us can remember back to our infancies. It is an enormous amount of time in proportion to the little we have known.

By the time we hit 40, a year is only 1/40th of our total experience. It is only a small fraction of our remembrance of things past. It is like adding one thin sheet to a fat folio of 39 other sheets.

A child has only a few sheets in his collection, so that adding one more represents a substantial addition to the memory bank. Time in this respect is much like money.

If you have $30 or $40 saved up and you add another $10, it seems and is a considerable chunk. But if you have a few thousand dollars save up and add another $10, it seem insignificant, even though it is the same amount. And the more we have, the less each increment counts.

Thus when we are quite old and have 70 or more years behind us, one more year flies by like a week in comparison with the memories and impressions we have banked over the decades. And each year, of course, the amount of experience we add is decreasingly smaller in proportion to the grand total.

So it is not entirely an illusion, or the faulty mechanism of a failing mind, that year by year time seems to increase its pace. It is an arithmetical ratio, like the $10 that dwindles to nothing as we amass more and more capital.

"Time passes," we say. But actually we pass while time stays on. The hour, the day, the year maintain their steady pace. It is we who rush faster and faster through eternity. The young at first cannot wait for Wednesday to turn into Saturday. Now old, they wonder on Saturday where Wednesday got to.

J.R. KING

Cape Girardeau