The Timothean Principle of the Hastening World

I have long entertained a theory which I call, for want of a better expression, “The Timothean Principle of the Hastening World: A Horological Theory of Cricketing Time” It is commonly supposed that we become slower as we grow older. I am not convinced that we do. We may become stiffer, more cautious, more easily distracted, and considerably less inclined to run for a bus, but that is another matter. My suspicion is that our own velocity remains remarkably constant. What changes is the velocity of the world around us. Each generation arrives into a world which is fractionally faster than the one preceding it, and therefore the past appears slow to us not because the people of the past were intrinsically slow, but because our temporal environment has accelerated.

Cricket provides, I think, an unusually elegant demonstration of the phenomenon. Watch an old Test match on film and one is immediately struck by the languor of it. Batsmen appear to have all the time in the world. Fielders move with a curious deliberation. Bowlers approach the crease without the desperate urgency which modern spectators have come to expect. Even the intervals between deliveries seem to belong to another species of time. Yet I do not think that the cricketers themselves experienced their movements as slow. A fast bowler of the 1950s did not wake in the morning thinking, “Today I shall bowl rather slowly because it is 1957.” He bowled at the pace his body permitted, and to the batsman standing before him the ball was every bit as immediate and consequential as a modern delivery.

Indeed, this is where my theory becomes rather more mischievous. Suppose, by some physical impossibility, we could transport a cricketer from 1955 into the present day without altering his body. I suspect that he would bowl precisely as he had bowled in 1955. We, however, would perceive him differently. His run-up would seem leisurely; his delivery would appear less violent; his fielders would seem almost stately. He would not have become slower. We would have become faster.

The same principle would apply in reverse. If we could travel physically backwards in time, I suspect that we should enter a world which seemed to us almost unnaturally sluggish. A modern Test match transplanted into the 1930s would look, to our accelerated eyes, like a rehearsal in which everyone had been instructed to move at half speed. Even the simple business of buying a cricket ticket at Nevil Road, in Bristol, would seem to require an age.Yet the players themselves would regard their movements as perfectly ordinary. They would not be acting slowly. We would simply have arrived from a faster temporal climate.

This is why old sporting films fascinate me. They do not merely preserve old clothes, old grounds and old hairstyles; they preserve, or appear to preserve, the tempo of an age. A batsman raises his bat, a bowler walks back to his mark, a wicketkeeper waits behind the stumps, and suddenly one has the impression that the clock itself has been slowed. The temptation is to say that the players were slower. I prefer to say that we have become faster.

So let me make this point clear: any living cricketer from the 1960s would not bowl any more slowly today than he did in his own time. His body has not been transported backwards or forwards along some mysterious temporal scale. What has changed is the environment around him. The world has accelerated; the player has not. What appeared fast to his contemporaries may therefore seem remarkably slow to us, not because his bowling has lost its pace, but because our own temporal frame of reference has quickened.

There is a curious analogy here with clocks themselves. An old mechanical clock, particularly one that has been neglected, may lose time, while a newer and better-regulated mechanism keeps a more exact pace. I do not propose this as physical evidence for my theory; any competent horologist would quite properly throw a shoe at me for such a suggestion. Nevertheless, as an image it is irresistible. Perhaps civilisation itself is a vast clockwork mechanism in which every new generation is wound slightly tighter than the last.

And this would explain something which has always puzzled me about ageing. The older man does not necessarily feel himself becoming temporally obsolete. He remains, internally, more or less the same creature who once ran onto a cricket field, chased a train, danced badly at a party or attempted some other youthful stupidity. His internal tempo - imprinted deep within his consciousness - has not altered nearly as much as the tempo of the world surrounding him. It is the younger generation which seems impossibly fast.

Thus the old cricketer watching a modern Twenty20 match may shake his head and say that the game has become frantic. The young spectator, meanwhile, may watch an old Test match and wonder why everybody appears to have forgotten that there is a clock. Both may be right. Neither has necessarily changed his own speed. They are simply measuring one another against different temporal backgrounds.

Perhaps, then, what we call progress is partly an acceleration of the human world. We do not merely invent faster trains, faster computers, faster bowlers and faster methods of communication. We gradually acquire a faster expectation of how quickly everything ought to happen. A delivery which once seemed rapid becomes ordinary; an ordinary delivery becomes slow; and eventually an entire generation looks at yesterday's cricket and wonders how anyone could possibly have had the patience to play it.

I remain unconvinced that time itself accelerates. That would require rather more evidence than I presently possess, and I have always regarded unsupported certainty as one of the less attractive forms of enthusiasm. But I am increasingly persuaded that our experience of time does accelerate—and that the acceleration is generational rather than merely biological.

We do not necessarily grow slower.

The world grows faster.

And cricket, being an unusually honest witness, has been leaving the evidence on film all along.