THE SENSE OF TIME.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.") have not had the advantage of reading Mr. Romance' article on " The Sense of Time," which you criticise, but apparently he does not remark upon one reason why time seems to pass more quickly as we grow older. Gibbon points out, in one of the notes to the "Decline and Fall," that each year of our life occupies a less proportion of the whole duration of our consciousness—perhaps one-sixth to a child of ten, and one- sixtieth to a man of sixty-five—and hence it appears to us rela- tively shorter. Beyond this, is not Mr. Romaues' opinion some- what confirmed by this,—that during our adult life, time appears long to us in proportion to the unfamiliarity of the events occurring in it? It must, I think, be the experience of others, as well as of myself, that the short holidays in the course of a some- what monotonous life appear far longer than the time spent in routine work; and this is, I believe, quite independent of any looking forward to the end of these vacations, but proportioned to the number of unusual events crowded into them.—I am,
[Our own experience is that holidays, being usually too short for what we want to crowd into them, appear to fly even more rapidly than the times of routine work, and that this was still more the case in childhood.—ED. Spectator.]
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