Time lapses

Some scribbles from my diary on the value of time

Hello! I’m Apoorva Sripathi, a writer, editor, and artist. If you think my work is valuable and would like to support me, follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram, share this post, and consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.

The Harvesters by Pieter Brueghel the Elder

1. Like every other year, I started this one too by looking back at the past. But unlike all the other years, I realised that the past can be put to good use sometimes. Last weekend, I designed my wedding invitation after months of not thinking about it, unintentionally. I had far more pressing matters to hand, notably this newsletter. But when the invitation came together, it took about 30 minutes. I used up old illustrations that I had created during my time at home in Chennai, giving me the chance to look back at the past. To see how the time served me well but to also help me ask myself, how I served the time in front of me. Is there such a thing as wasting (or wasted) time?

2. I used to think quite vehemently so, disparaging myself for not utilising it better. I still do this from time to time – “look at all this time you have had. You could’ve written a book! You could’ve created a zine. Painted an imposing canvas. Filled a sketchbook with illustrations. You could’ve worked on your poetry. Tested out a tiramisu cake. Made the cheese and greens pie you’ve wanted to eat for the longest time. Worked out. Lifted weights.” – and my list is no doubt endless. But the time I spend thinking, staring, listless – tracing outlines in my head – as well as engaging with it in other ways – drawing, cooking, writing, reading, watching TV, bookbinding – I find has come back to me when I most needed it.

3. Like the three months I spent obsessively playing Age of Empires 2, downloaded from an illicit CD-Rom that my cousin brought back from a library in California where he was a computers student. He thought I’d love it – taking my time building up a civilisation, planting farms, building barracks, researching the various ages of every civilisation from ‘Dark’ to ‘Imperial’. 1000 years lived in an hour, inaccurately so, some of it spent training a young Joan of Arc to fight against the English in the siege of Orléans as part of the Hundred Years’ War. I wouldn’t have known about the Teuton campaign of Frederick Barbarossa to expand the Holy Roman Empire, or who Brian Boru was (the High King of Ireland). Or that Edward I was also known as Edward Longshanks. All of it seemed like truly useless information rattling around my head – to the 15 year old girl sat in front of her computer, this game was just an efficient tool to combat loneliness and not an encyclopaedia of knowledge that would come in handy during long quizzes and certainly not a way to stay sane during a period of intense intestine ulcers that wreaked havoc on my physical and psychological selves, both yearning for someone who didn’t want anything to do with me.

4. I have spent these last few weeks re-reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, spotting ‘yearning’ way too quickly (“do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning”). More than anything, last year, I desired time – time back and time auxiliary – but I had an abundance of it which I squandered judiciously. I must admit not all amounts of time thrill me, mostly because I don’t know what to do with all that excess.

5. memory is existence

   in its purest form, a thoroughfare

   for your mind to remember that

   you existed yesterday even against

   your will and that you will exist tomorrow

   without your acquiescence, your imprints scorched
   like a hand on a candle irradiating long black expanses that will

   soon be erased – a faint footprint eaten by the frothing grey sea, revealing fresh wet sand holding the delusion of the unknowable universe.¹

6. I think time is most accessible through food, a statement that is as salient, mundane, and true as ‘food is political’. A jar of pickles will tell you that - although if you’ve found a talking jar of pickles, you should hold it tight. There are very few things that are actually special in this world and far too many that claim this position. It doesn’t always have to be about fermentation for instance; think about the progress of globalisation of food and foodways, the urge to relocalise food through, say, farmers’ markets, or the attempts to safeguard ‘traditional’ and ‘heritage’ foods which tend to reconstruct communities and transforms said foodways.

7. In university, I learned that terroir is also a way to keep time. It seems to be a romantic notion of people, place, environment, and cultural traditions coming together to shape the character of everything from champagne and chevre to onions and peaches, when in reality it is a “congealed taskscape”, i.e. landscape in perpetual motion, landscape being in a situation that is constantly changing and in negotiation with just about everyone and everything. Tim Ingold who coined the term taskscape, analysed the temporality of landscape through the painting The Harvesters. Ingold, in his paper ‘The Temporality of Landscape’, argues in favour of adopting a ‘dwelling perspective’ where the landscape “is constituted as an enduring record of – and testimony to – the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves.” I see it in The Harvesters, where Bruegel, the artist of said painting, brings the detail and care to his work, forming the landscapes in which people have lived so intricately. Zoom into the background of this painting and you can spot lone boats in the background presumably fishing. At the forefront, workers eat bowls of porridge, bite into cheese on bread, and nap under trees. This “congealed taskscape” encompasses more than pasturelands or wheat harvesters. There are perhaps “ambient microorganisms²” that have made their way into the wheel of cheese that’s being sliced by a worker in the painting.

8. Time and cheese reminds of Rachel Roddy’s piece for the inaugural issue of Cheese, the magazine of culture, on how mozzarella connects our global food systems. She looks at the existence of water buffaloes in Italy and how their presence in the country is a product of migration from India through time, 5000 years ago, as well as the pianura campana that “provided ideal breeding and working conditions”. Cheese of course is milk maturing through time and time providing for other inventions³ to help cheese come into being. There is mutual benefaction. Roddy, who traced the piece through a road trip, arrives just after the mozzarella is made at a warehouse, sometime in the afternoon, taking us through a modern road to an ancient time, reminding us that enduring identities and cheese both take time.

9. The end of the last sentence is a constant reminder to myself that things take time. Life takes time.⁴

1. poem very kindly edited by Isabela of Feminist Food Journal

2. Heather Paxson in ‘Locating Value in Artisan Cheese: Reverse Engineering Terroir for New-World Landscapes’, 2010.

3. such as pottery and knives

4. This is such a lukewarm sentiment but it’s true. I’m trying not to cringe at diary entries for my newsletter but it is 2025 and I have nothing concrete to write about just yet.