A sense of time
You, as an individual here and now, are as now as people in the past were as now to themselves then, or as people in the future will be to themselves.
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day;
fritter and waster the hours in an off-hand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town;
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.
Tired of lying in the sunshine,
staying home to watch the rain,
you are young and life is long,
and there is time to kill today.
And then one day, you find
ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run.
You missed the starting gun. And you
run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking;
racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older,
shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.
Every year is getting shorter,
never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught,
or half a page of scribbled lines.
Hanging on to quiet desperation
is the English way.
The time is gone. The song is over.
Thought I'd something more to say.1
A perspective often not practiced, people little appreciate that the things they do today affect the nows of the future. If, for example you leave this light on now, I must expend the effort in the future to turn it off. If you leave dirty dishes, you or I must clean them up later. This is a developed appreciation of the ramifications of what one does.
Education in early America was left in the hands of the elders as the younger and stronger were most often required for field work. This may have helped develop a sense of time we do not duplicate in our modern school systems.2
A sense of death
Some day I will be as close to death as the clock is close to striking the next hour. This is another expression of the sense of time and one's place in it.
Death comes to us all.3
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.4
. . .death ought to be right there before the eyes of a young man just as much as an old one. . ..5
No one is so ignorant as not to know that some day he must die. Nevertheless, when death draws near he turns wailing and trembling, looking for a way out. Wouldn't you think a man a prize fool if he burst into tears because he didn't live a thousand years ago? A man is as much a fool for shedding tears because he isn't going to be alive a thousand years from now. There is no difference between the one and the other – you didn't exist and you won't exist – you've no concern with either period.6
The feeling that death is at hand sometimes inspires us of itself with a quick resolve no longer to evade a thing that is quite inevitable. . . . To contemplate death in the future calls for a courage that is slow, and consequently difficult to acquire. If you do not know how to die, never mind. Nature will give you full and adequate . . .****7
If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; Nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care for it.8
Tzu-kung asked about government. The Master said, ‘Give them enough food, give them enough arms, and the common people will have trust in you.’
Tzu-kung said, ‘If one had to give up one of these three, which should one give up first?’
‘Give up arms.’
Tzu-kung said, ‘If one had to give up one of the remaining two, which should one give up first?’
Give up food. Death has always been with us since the beginning of time, but when there is no trust, the common people will have nothing to stand on.’9
It is a folly to try to beat death. One second after my heart stops thumping I shall not know or care what becomes of all my books and articles.10
‘Shapes frightening to the sight, Hardship and Death.’[Virgil, Aeneid,VI:277]
Our Virgil perfectly rightly says that they are frightening not in reality, but ‘to the sight’, in other words that they seem so but in fact are not.11
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1 Waters, Roger, Rick Wright, David Gilmour and Nicholas Mason. Time. .
2 ++++q4b,c
3 Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones. . .
4 Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones. . .
5 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Letters from a Stoic. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1969. Pg. 58.
6 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Letters from a Stoic. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1969. Pg. 127.
7 Montaigne, Michele de. Essays. Translation and introduction by j. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1958. Pp. 328-329.
8 Thomas, Lewis. The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher. New York: Viking Press, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979. Quoting Montaigne.
9 Confucius. The Analects. Translation and introduction by D. C. Lau. Harmondsworth,. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1979. Pg. 113.
10 Fecher, Charles A. Mencken: A Study of his Thought. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1978. Pp. 113-114.
11 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Letters from a Stoic. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1969. Pg. 109.
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Copyright 1998 by Stephen B. Waters. This page was last built on 11/25/98; 4:18:32 PM. sbwaters@rny.com At the moment I am using Macintosh OS to work on this website. |