If Only at Nine O’clock
On a fruit fly, the wisdom of hindsight, and the tidiest regret on record. We are obsessed with time. We optimise our mornings, track our sleep, and read the latest advice on how to add ten years to our lives. Experts forecast the future with great confidence, but the future keeps arriving uninvited. Behind it all lies a quiet wish we should have known sooner: which job to take, which warning to heed, and which people to hold on to while we could. Yet the clearest statement of the problem I have come across belongs to a creature with a single day to live. The Fruit Fly Snoopy has been talking to a fruit fly, which is more than many of us manage with our neighbours. He reports the conversation to Woodstock with a small, contented smile. Some of these creatures, it seems, live only twenty-four hours. This one had a single regret, which he expressed with the composure of someone who has seen the end of the day: “I wish I knew at nine o’clock what I know now.” Consider the econo...