Many people seem to believe that the way to make the most of time is to cut it fine. Arriving at the very last minute means not wasting precious seconds that could be spent in a more productive pursuit than loafing around at some airport terminal or railway station – or worst of all, a waiting room.

This often carries an element of pride or machismo – waiting is for wimps. But what does not wasting time really mean? It seems to mean putting time to some profitable use or intensive cultivation: getting the highest possible yield out of it. But this attitude could lead to the ultimate waste of time; the whole of time turned into a wasteland in which no moment can be enjoyed for its own sake.

Somehow what works for salami (the fine slicing) does not succeed with time. I like time in thick slabs. When time is too finely sliced, it does not taste like time at all. If you cut all the fat off it (to adjust the metaphor), it takes on an ominous and unrelenting aspect – you feel there is never enough of it. If I cut it too fine getting to the airport or station, I spend the whole journey in an anxious stew, waiting for the tube train or bus to get stuck in a tunnel or a traffic jam on the North Circular Road.

According to my no doubt rather peculiar calculus, this results in a double loss of time. First of all, the journey itself is lost, as a stretch of enjoyable time. But leaving enough time to arrive early means not only that the journey is salvaged from the dread of last-minute, fatal delay, but also that a chunk of potentially creative time is released at the point of arrival.

The other day Ching Ling and I, on our way to visit friends, arrived early at a country railway station. Nothing much was going on there; a man arrived to pick up his daughter; we watched a group of young Chinese lads waiting for a minibus; a man with a comically friendly dog, tail wagging so hard it could be used as a source of renewable energy, turned up at the ticket office. There was a wonderfully desultory feel about things, which you rarely get in the city, combined with the haunting scents of early spring, a thrush somewhere repeating its evening song.

The minutes we spent there could certainly have been considered a waste of time. There was no particular point to them; they had figured in no schedule or timetable; they were a chronological anomaly. But they stick in my memory as some of the most precious in the past few weeks.

Thank goodness the poet Edward Thomas was not too fixated on the timetable when his express train stopped unexpectedly one June afternoon at the country station of Adelstrop. The word he uses is “unwontedly”, which implies not just that the stop was unscheduled, but that it broke the crust of ordinary, chugging, routine time and opened a portal into something different.

The sudden stop meant that Thomas was able to appreciate where he was, and where he never expected to be, rather than being moved ever onwards on smooth rails towards an ever-receding goal.

What he saw and heard was nothing special; an empty platform, a man clearing his throat, the ordinary flowers and trees and haycocks and one of the commonest birds of English summer.

But the minute Thomas spent at Adelstrop station left an indelible impression; it printed an essence of summer time in the English countryside on his visual and aural imagination. Above all that minute had depth – depth that transformed the sense of place and history.

Instead of the flat landscape you see through a train window passing at high speed, a succession of unrelated “views”, Thomas experienced the mysterious profundity of place. The place suddenly became part of him; he was planted within it, rather than being rushed through it; he became, as a perceiving being, the centre and the heart of it.

Being at the centre means perceiving concentric circles radiating outwards. And the sense that best perceives those subtle gradations of nearness and farness, which hearkens towards them, is the sense of hearing, not the sense of sight. We are used to being eye-centred (not to mention I-centred), to directing our eyes almost as an extension of our hands, to grasp and grab. Hearing works in quite a different way. We are powerless to direct our ears; we must allow sounds to come to them.

Edward Thomas, in the unexpected lull of time, allows the sound of the blackbird’s song to come to him, and he hearkens towards it. At that moment comes the epiphany. The blackbird’s call, in its contentment and plenitude, summons “all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire”, and with them a profound sense of English geography and history, of gentle hills and valleys, stone villages, a university city and a cathedral one, woods and fields, in their most benign and peaceful aspect. Not a waste of time at all.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres