by Public Service Associate, Owen
“The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.”
Once a year, I read Dracula, following along with each day that passes in the book, which spreads out an already sizable story across about six months of the year. The opening scene of Bram Stoker’s novel might seem unusual to someone unfamiliar with the source text, someone more used to the movie monster version played by Willem Dafoe, Max Schreck, Bill Skarsgård, or Bela Lugosi.
The novel begins with a series of diary entries by one of our protagonists, Jonathan Harker, narrating his journey through the mountains of Romania, stopping more than once to leave himself reminders to get recipes for the food he enjoys as he makes for the castle of the now famous Count Dracula. By the time you reach early October, the action is at a fever pitch, the group of remaining characters joining forces to finally fight back against the vampire…until they take a month-long train and boat journey across Europe back to Romania to fight Dracula inside his castle.
It’s a funny little quirk of the story, (one that you maybe wouldn’t notice if you were reading the whole thing at once like a normal person) but this self-imposed exercise in patience really enhances some parts of the novel. It forces me to appreciate the mechanics of the story in a practical way, waiting each day along with the characters, the anticipation building alongside them as they drift closer to their destination. It also gives me an appreciation in my own life for the modern conveniences of say, my car, or a telephone.
This autumn, Dracula had me thinking about time more than ever, so I wanted to share some other things that I’m enjoying this year that really encourage you to be present as time passes and can even be really fun to turn into your own measuring stick for the year.
To say everything that I love about Walt Whitman would take about six years’ worth of blog posts and probably three or four powerpoint presentations, but I’ll start here by talking about his poem Song of Myself. Included untitled in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself is one of Whitman’s many masterpieces, a reflective and romantic collection of verses that seeks to define the American experience.
In later printings, the poem was divided in 52 separate sections, enough for one for each week of the year. This can be a fun way to make the poem accessible and to think more deeply about it. Read one section a week for a year. Read it every day, really think about each section. Maybe by this time next year, you’ll want to read it again. You can also enjoy this project from independent filmmakers in Alabama who are stitching together a reading of the poem one verse at a time.
Buckle in to hear about this again at the end of the year when we do our best of 2026 round up, but Carly Rae Jepsen’s Day and Night is one of the best albums of this year. The queen of B-Sides has outdone herself once again, this time by releasing a 24-track double album, splitting it down the middle into two sections, Day and Night. The album plays with the listener, shifting from the Day section’s live instrumentals and Jepsen’s familiar light and breezy sounds to the Night section’s synthy dance tracks, guiding you through an entire 24 hours of music. Day and Night plays with your sense of time, calling to mind the disorientation of an early morning at work to a late night on the dancefloor. This album has the passage of time as its primary focus, and not for nothing, it’s a certified banger.
Possibly the most blatant item on my list is Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy. A project that stretches across three films and 18 years, each film follows Ethan Hawke as Jesse and Julie Delpy as Céline, two people who meet and fall in love in various European locales, each film taking place leading up to the moment until they part. The middle film, Before Sunset, even runs in real time, eighty minutes of Hawke and Delpy living out eighty minutes as Jesse and Céline. Similar to the previous entry on the list, the primary focus of these films is the passage of time, a recurring theme throughout many, if not all of Linklater’s films including Boyhood, Nouvelle Vague, Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Everybody Wants Some!!
My final batch of recommendations is tied to Mark Kurlansky’s 1968. The book details the positively overwhelming number of major world events that took place in 1968, including the RFK assassination, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the establishment of the first EMS corp in Pittsburgh, the protests against the Miss America pageant, the Tet Offensive, the Prague Spring, the Summer Olympics, the election of Richard Nixon, worldwide university student protests, and the evolution of the counter-culture movement brought into the national spotlight by the Summer of Love.
Reading this book is a lesson in itself: a lot can happen in a very short amount of time. I recommend reading it and writing down every name that is new to you, every detail that you didn’t know. Dive deep into the bibliography at the back of the book and find your next read about Charles de Gaulle or Apollo 8. Your parents and grandparents will be quick to remind you that 1968 was not so long ago as we would like to think, and that the lives they lived then are not nearly so different as the ones we live today.
Whether you start with Count Dracula or dive in with Carly Rae Jepsen, I hope that in the very least this list inspires you to take an embodied look at how you spend your time, and that you enjoy looking back at the way you spent it. Take a moment, stop, soak in a leisurely hour and start something new this October.