Time Enough at Last

Illustration by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

In the classic Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last”, mild-mannered and bespectacled bank teller Henry Bemis, constantly bullied by his boss, henpecked by his wife, and belittled by everyone else, can never find time enough to pursue his love of reading—until a nuclear holocaust annihilates the rest of the world, leaving our Mr. Bemis as the sole survivor with—finally—time enough to pursue his passion for great literature at last. What a lucky guy.

After over three decades working in public education, I was finally able to retire last spring. I had been planning for it—dreaming about it, I guess, for years. I figured I would be able to devote much more time to my own passions—writing, music, collecting vinyl, gardening, and—like Mr. Beamis—reading. I was imagining retirement as sort of an extended vacation—no schedules, no responsibilities, and few worries.

As a child, summer vacation (or at least my memories of it) felt like an extended stream of unrestricted and unstructured wanderings (physical and spiritual)—a complete and total freedom. On the last day of school, the prospects of summer adventures stretched out in front of us like a magic carpet. We could explore, read, play softball, join pick-up games, get into all sorts of mischief, or just hang out. Of course, as a child, we had very few responsibilities and relatively few worries. Time was a long uninterrupted stream channeled only by our imaginations and desires—at least until the school year started.

College seemed to have only slightly more responsibilities—and we never took most of them all that seriously. We went to classes, did the work, sort of prepared ourselves for the future, but spent a lot of time socializing, experimenting, and stretching the envelope of possibilities. Sometimes skipping class to hang out seemed more important than facing any consequences. Time was semi-structured and still mostly beholden to nothing but our desires. 

Then came the bitter truth of growing up. Adulthood—and careers—partitioned time as neatly as a mathematician bisecting a circle into infinite angles. Work, marriage, kids, and home ownership demanded our attention nearly every second of the day. There was little or no time for personal time, except for what we could (very) occasionally carve out for ourselves. Our imaginations had been harnessed, tamed, and housebroken. We were grown-ups who could only vaguely remember the halcyon romps through our summertime childhoods. 

Through my working years I watched many of my colleagues retire. One here, one there, always talking about their big plans to travel, move to the country, build that dream house, or finally learn how to play the guitar. I made my own plans and dreamed my own dreams of retirement. Somehow in my mind, these plans began to resemble the memories of my childhood summers, unfettered by worries, duties, or obligations. It would be a liberation, a new freedom, a new awakening. I would be able to walk down paths I had not taken, try adventures I had been forced to forgo, and hone new skills I had always dreamed of mastering. This was going to be my time. 

Now that retirement is here, I find that time has gotten the better of me. Not time itself, that vast river of experience and accumulation, but the parsing of time, the recognition of it as a commodity and as a resource. As a child, we never recognized time as a limited resource. We never had to. It seemed to stretch in front of us like a night sky full of stars—the longer you considered it, the deeper it became. Anything and everything were possible. Now we know that there will be an end to time—our time, and that achieving what we want or need to do is mired in that knowledge like a fly in amber. 

And, of course, I did know duties and obligations did not magically evaporate on my sixty-fifth birthday. To think that they would, even on the most winsome level, was nothing but naïve. 

I don’t know if there is a way to recreate those magical and idyllic days of our childhood, ruled only by our imaginations and the range of our bicycles, but to follow nothing but our own hopes and desires would be the epitome of selfishness (probably one of the most underrated virtues of childhood). Giving ourselves over our selfish desires would mean ignoring our families, our neighborhood, our planet, and the greater good, but even if our aspirations included doing unselfish work for charities like Habitat for Humanity, joining AmeriCorps, or working the local food pantry, wouldn’t those noble activities be undertaken mainly for personal fulfillment, to make us feel good about ourselves? Wouldn’t parsing our free time according to the strictures of a set schedule put a damper on the ultimate freedom of mind and spirit? 

So, like poor little Henry Bemis, whose dream of being able to read his Dickens and Melville and Shakespeare and Hemingway turned to ashes, my own dream of the afterlife—life after work—is not everything I might have expected. Time will never again be the free-flowing lazy river of my childhood. It has been dammed, diverted, polluted, and exploited. While those magical times are still caught in the amber of my memory, I will never again have the sensibilities of a child exploring the planet for the first time. 

That is the irony of retirement: we have all the time we want but we do not really possess it. We never really did. We thought we owned it as children, but it was only humoring us, biding its own time. We didn’t know what it was then, and now we are all too aware of it. We dissected it, assigned it, and parsed, but we never really owned our own time. It passes, unaware of us and our joys and struggles, uncaring and autonomous. 

Henry Bemis thought he had it made, but time, as it will for all of us, proved itself to be nothing but a cruel joke.