Is time running out?
On deadlines, a trussed rabbit, and a bucket list.
In 2005, at the end of a seven-month stint in Tokyo, I flew back to London via California, driving along Route 101 to Los Angeles from San Francisco. The US road trip, which had long been on my bucket list, was a brief interlude between jobs, and I was only in LA for a couple of days. On the first evening, I dined at a vegan fusion eatery on Santa Monica that served mock meat. As I looked at disturbingly real-life-looking faux chicken breasts, steaks, and bacon—reminiscent of those plastic, vinyl and wax fake foods, known as sampuru in Japan—I thought of the English essayist William Hazlitt’s response to the sight of a rabbit served for dinner. “I hate to see a rabbit trussed, or a hare brought to the table in the form which it occupied while living,” he wrote in 1826. As the historian Keith Thomas argued in his book Man and the Natural World, Hazlitt’s response reflected a fundamental shift in social attitudes to nature. Butchering animals for food was now a cause for disquiet; modern sensibilities required that their slaughter be carefully sequestered from view.
While in LA, I had meant to contact my friend, Denis Cosgrove, who had moved there a few years previously to teach at UCLA. In the end, however, there wasn’t time. And as it turned out, time was running out for Denis. Shortly afterwards, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. In March 2008, he passed away at his home in West Hollywood, aged fifty-nine.
At the time of his death, Denis was at the height of his creative power. He had been writing new papers and a new book and was about to take up a position as Getty Distinguished Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. When I corresponded with him, he was philosophical about his situation, but also frustrated that he had so little time left. He needed more of it to spend with his family, to do all the things that he wanted to do before the end.
Now, as I fast approach the age Denis was when I last spoke to him, I understand this worry about time. It’s an anxiety poignantly expressed by the poet John Keats in his sonnet ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be,’ where he describes his consternation at the thought that time is running out. The poem was written eight years before Hazlitt’s reflection on the rabbit and three years before Keats’s own death from tuberculosis, aged twenty-five, in 1821.
What does a trussed rabbit have to do with fear of death? A lot, I’d suggest, since both represent changing views of our place, as humans, in the natural world. At the beginning of his poem Keats analogizes artistic creation with the cultivation and harvesting of crops. His mind is fertile, his pen gleans his brain, and books “Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain.” This is imagery that evokes a pre-industrial, rural world of healthy toil, of seasons and natural cycles, of life, death, and rebirth. But Keats’s race against time, his anxiety about productivity, is symptomatic of a distinctly modern understanding of the value of time as linear, progressive, and finite. While literature and art have long been preoccupied by loss and the evanescence of life, I’d argue that this is a poem about something else: the terror of the deadline.
During the nineteenth century, the experience of time was transformed. In an industrializing and increasingly urban world, time was money and required precise calibration. Workers’ lives were regulated by factory whistles; timetables were required to synchronize the operations of the railways. Electric lights stretched the working day. A new understanding of geological processes intimated that the earth was millions of years old—as opposed to the thousands of years indicated in Genesis—acting as a spur to evolutionary thinking. This contraction and expansion of time had several upshots. Human life came to be seen as no more than a flash in the pan; and the pressure was on to maximize productivity—to squeeze as much as possible into a human lifespan. Think of the factory in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) where workers are tyrannized by a giant clock. The title of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) puns on the accelerated time of industrial life. While the movie begins with a clock, the protagonist has a mental breakdown from the effort of trying to keep up with the work on a fast-moving assembly line. Later, as a mechanic’s assistant, he flattens his boss’s pocket watch in a factory machine.
In 1865—thirty-nine years after Hazlitt’s rabbit—Lewis Carroll gives us another bunny in a world of messed-up time. This is the hurrying White Rabbit at the beginning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, anxiously late, who takes a watch out of his waist-coat pocket: “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the word “deadline” was gaining currency. In November 1865, the Confederate soldier Henry Wirz was found guilty of cruelty by a military tribunal and sentenced to death. While overseeing prisoners of war incarcerated at Andersonville, Georgia, he had imposed a line within which they were to be confined. If they crossed the “deadline,” they risked being shot.
The year before Denis’s death and two years after my bucket list road trip along Route 101, Rob Reiner’s movie The Bucket List came out about two terminally ill men (played by Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman) who escape from a cancer ward to see and do everything they can before they die. The movie is based on a screenplay by Justin Zackham, who had apparently coined the term “bucket list,” which derives from the slang to “kick the bucket.” It’s been suggested that the expression alludes to suicide by hanging after standing on a bucket. But a more likely etymology, identified in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable in 1870, defines the bucket as the beam from which butchered pigs “are hung by their hindlegs” with “their heads hanging downwards.”
While the Reiner movie celebrates the importance of relationships, it’s also an ode to the deadline and to the race against time that Keats frets about in his poem. And buried within this anxiety about the looming end is the thought of the slaughtered beast, the trussed rabbit, and the hanging hog which Hazlitt shrunk from; the cruel world that we try to forget as we hurry to pack as much life as possible into the little life that remains.