Except something within us which is always surprised by change.

Not my words but those of Thomas Hardy.

And I certainly agree with the sentiment.

In fact, the sheer absurdity of how swiftly time goes – not just the days and weeks and months but the years. The decades.

How is it possible, for example, that our children are no longer babes in arms, toddlers, tentative five year olds starting their first term at school? It is such a cliche to talk about how fleeting time is but its cliche status simply confirms its truth.

Growing up, listening to parents talking about their youth, I had always assumed that the time must have felt so very distant to them.

Belonging to bygone eras, ghostly and indistinct.

How wrong I was.

Now I know that all those memories, events, occasions feel in close touching distance.

As if with ease we could step back into one of our school days, let alone those of our children.

Another quote for you and this one from 19th century American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

A lovely image, somehow – the shadow of the past hovering and trailing emotions and memories.

Yet the absurdity of the speed of one’s life still nags. Still bewilders and disturbs.

But the wonderful thing about novels and their characters is that they are ageless.

Fixed and unaffected by the passing of time.

Indeed, the men and women we meet and get to know on the pages of novels are still, fixed entities that we can rely on finding when we return to a particular book.

We might leave protagonists poised on the start of a new life – marriage if it’s a Jane Austen novel – but for the reader they remain on the starting blocks and it’s a case of Age will not weary them.

19th century novels have neat and rounded endings, of course. We are aware of the fate and prospects for the heroes and heroines.

Unless you are reading Great Expectations for which Charles Dickens wrote two endings, his initial being exchanged for something more upbeat and optimistic prior to publication.

In his original, there is no likelihood for Pip of a union with Estella. Pip sees her in a carriage in Piccadilly, a married woman living with a doctor after the death of her first husband, the dastardly, abusive Bentley Drummle and they part forever:

I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for in her face and in her voice and in her touch she gave me the assurance that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.

The amended ending, however, allows us a sentimental picture of their future together:

the evening mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

Which would readers prefer today? The original version, no doubt, the bitter-sweet truth of it appeals to a modern sensibility. Whereas the Victorians clearly wanted their Happy Ever After ending so Dickens, ever a man to please the market, obliged.

But it is undoubtedly one of the endless joys of reading.

We may have changed, time adding its signifiers in facial lines and bodily complaints, but our book shelves still hold on to the moment of composition. Of creation.

And there’s the added bonus of picking up a novel read or even endlessly re-read in the past: it hooks us to a moment in our own lives when we chose that particular author and devoted hours to reading their work.

In a first flat or house, a favoured cafe, on a particular holiday, during a bout of illness or on a long journey: our books trawl with them not just delightfully fixed characters unaffected by the passing of time but also our own memories. They hook us to a time and a place.

And, until someone invents a way of stalling time and giving us back those spent and unspent years, it’s really the best that we can do!