Name: Time, Tarkovsky And The Pandemic
Uploaded: 2026-02-01T17:09:24.000Z
Duration: 8 min 51 s
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Adverbs of manner

In my last video, I talked about how the pandemic altered our relationship to space, to the built environments of our urban centers suddenly emptied of the people they were made for.

Those eerie cityscapes reminded me of de Chirico paintings in which he sought to depict the world with a strangeness that forces the viewer to see the familiar with alien eyes.

Like those paintings, quarantine gave us a unique chance to reflect on our world, to ask more fundamental questions about our relationship with the spaces we live and move in.

Our sense of time during the pandemic was just as warped as our sense of space, maybe more so.

Those first few weeks of the lockdown, time felt simultaneously slow and fast.

Hours dragged on at a snail's pace, but weeks flew by.

2020 seemed endless while it was happening.

But in retrospect, it feels brief, shorter than a normal year.

These contradictory impressions of the passage of time are not unique to the pandemic.

Our sense of time in the present and our memory of time are different things, and

we experience them different in the moment.

Time is warped by our emotions and activity.

When we're having fun or busy working toward a goal, time generally seems to pass more quickly.

When we're bored or anxious without much to do, time drags.

Scientists imagine the internal clock as a counting pacemaker.

The more pulses you count, the longer a given duration seems.

The more attention we give to time, the slower it feels.

When we're doing something fun, we forget to count the pulses, and time speeds up.

Memory, on the other hand, judges time in a different way.

Thinking back on events, the mind doesn't count pulses, but memories.

Good vacations remember those pass in a flash.

Before you know it, you're already on the plane home.

But later, when you think back on the trip, it feels long, like so much happened.

That's because vacations are full of novel and emotional experiences, and

those are what get stored in memory in retrospective.

The more we can remember in a given period, expands our sense of its length.

What do you remember from the first three months of lockdown?

If you were a doctor or nurse or essential worker on Covid's front lines, you might remember a lot.

And those early days may seem like a year's worth of experience.

If you're like me and spent weeks at home doing the same few things day in and day out, far less will have stuck in your memory.

And that time might feel extremely scant.

Whether Covid time seemed long or short for everyone, I think there was and is a sense of temporal distortion.

Maybe I should explain what you've been looking at for the past three and a half minutes.

When talking about time distortions, there's no more relevant artist than the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.

This is a shot from his 1983 film Nostalgia, in which the main character is trying to cross an empty pool without letting a candle.

You may have noticed that this is the second time the candle died.

The camera has been slowly following him back and forth, and

it's right about now, as he heads to the start again and the shot crosses the four minute mark, that you become aware of the odd encounter you're having with time itself.

You can feel the texture of it, its presence, as if time were not only a concept, but

a substance stretching out in front of you, expanding and contracting with every breath.

Beyond interest, beyond boredom, Tarkovsky induces a kind of trance.

Like De Chirico, Tarkovsky depicts reality with a dreamlike quality that lets us feel the familiar as foreign.

His camera glides back and forth like a hypnotic pendulum.

The man's footsteps register like the pulses of a pacemaker.

Tarkovsky locks our attention on time so that it slows to a crawl.

We feel every second of this nine minute shot and the moments between seconds too.

In daily life, we almost never experience time like this.

Those instances when we are focused on time are usually those when we want it to pass quickly, like when we're waiting for something.

Tarkovsky is dilating a segment of our personal timeline to such a degree that we catch a glimpse of the infinity beneath the normal rhythms of life.

He reminds us that this time is always there, that we can access it, that we don't have to follow the accelerating tempo of the world around us.

You don't come out of a Tarkovsky film with the same perspective on time you had when you went in.

I think there are some rhythms we'll be eager to get back to, and

others, now that we've experienced their absence, will be eager to leave behind.

In a decade, we won't believe that we ever devoted time to certain things or that we didn't devote time to others.

Life, like film, is a mosaic made with time.

Some sections are fast, some slow, some we remember, some vanish.

The pandemic was and is horrible in so many ways, but

it let us see the mosaics of the lives we were living.

With that knowledge, maybe we can better design our time into the future.

Sorry, I have been away for the last couple of months.

I am working on something that I am very very excited about that I can't talk about just yet.

Sorry again and I needed some time to focus solely on that.

So I appreciate you sticking around and giving me that time.

You will see the fruits of those labors in a little while, I promise.

Otherwise, I hope everybody has been good and healthy in the first part of 2021.

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