Say What? Time flies when you're having fun / Variety is the spice of life
It's a new year, so this is a good time to discuss these two wise sayings about how our time on earth can be perceived. We'll take a closer look with the help of Neil Gaiman's Sandman and his siblings and employees.
It's not clear when the saying "Time flies when you're having fun" first appeared. Its elder sibling, the aphorism "Time flies," goes back at least to the Roman poet Virgil (70 - 19 BCE). In his long poem "The Georgics," Virgil says fugit irreparabile tempus: "Time flees irretrievably." Nowadays, this is usually abbreviated to Tempus fugit. which gets translated as "time flies." Virgil was talking about how easily and completely time can be lost to us, but the more modern expression simply notes the transience of time:
Morpheus watched with disbelief as his youngest sister and her dog wandered into view, stopping to examine a dandelion growing in a crack on the sidewalk with the same interest as she showed in a No Parking sign. As she finally approached him, the Lord of Dreams drew himself up and looked down his nose. "Delirium, I have been waiting for you for the last hour."
"Wow," said Delirium. A flock of soap bubbles drifted from her fingertips and sank to the ground, where they popped mournfully.
"I told you not to stop and play with the motorcycles," said the dog Barnabas, under his breath.
"Was that really an hour? Time flies," said Delirium, philosphically.
The expanded form of the expression seems to be fairly recent in its origins, although I couldn't find any exact documentation. While "time flies" is simply a truism about the nature of time, the longer saying is more about how we perceive time when our minds are happily occupied:
"Perhaps you have time to indulge yourself with this sort of petty interference in human affairs, sister-brother, but I do not," said Dream. "I have far too many duties in my realm and outside it to amuse myself in such a fashion. You must have spent a full month on this."
Desire raise hir perfectly drawn brows. "Was it a month? I hardly noticed, brother. Time flies when you're having fun, they say."
The phenomenon that Desire notes has been verified by recent psychological research: in fact, when people are happily occupied, their perception of the amount of time that's passed is that it's shorter than when they're doing something tedious.
Our second saying has a more definite history. William Cowper's 1785 poem "The Task" contains the lines Variety's the very spice of life,/That gives it all its flavor. The implication is that without differences in life experiences - whether we're talking about ice cream flavors, the weather, or the cultural backgrounds of the people we encounter - we would find life boring:
"Yah know," said Mervyn Pumpkinhead, "I don't mind doin' his work for him. Put up a mountain range today, take down a castle tomorrow: it's all the same t' me. But dealin' with a flood of little eyeballs on bug legs? That's not the same. It's just not."
"Ah, well," said Lucien the librarian; "They say that variety is the spice of life, Mervyn."
"Well, if they want those little eyeballs, then they can have 'em," said Mervyn
I'll conclude by wishing you all a year that contains just enough variety to spice up your time and make it fly enjoyably.
Sources
- Tempus Fugit (in the blog Marginalia: Notes, observances, and commentary from a high school Latin teacher)
- You’re having fun when time flies (Not Exactly Rocket Science, Science Blogs)
- Variety is the spice of life (in the Facts on File Dictionary of Proverbs by Martin H. Manser, Facts on File Inc., 2002)