Time & its Passing

I recently read somewhere the quote “nothing is as far away as one minute ago” and realized that that is indeed a much more horrifying statement than it appears at first glance. There is absolutely no difference in “unattainability” between the past five minutes that have led you to arrive at this sentence and the minutes that passed when Neil Armstrong became the first to tread on extraterrestrial soil or when Hannibal and his elephants defiantly crossed the Alps. Although the past five minutes of your life are still at this very moment extraordinarily vivid, almost tangibly real in your mind, they are just as irrecoverably spent as the entire lives of our great-grandparents and some of our grandparents. People who lived, loved and hungered just like you and I, who experienced joy, anguish, depression and exhilaration in the exact same human way you and I do have permanently disappeared from the face of this world. With them have gone their friends, their enemies, their parents, their teachers, their accountants, their grocers, their memories, the majority of their stories, and their entire generation. And yet perhaps the most sobering thought of all is that within a short century, it will be us that they think of in this way. It will be our stories, stories which we are perfectly capable of telling now and stories that are not yet forgotten, yet stories that will be forgotten. The ability to call a friend on the phone and say “Hey, remember that one time when we…” and have them respond because they remember it too is a precious gift, although many do not regard it as such. Within a century or two’s time those little memories which are precious time capsules to you will be just as unimportant and entirely unknown to future generations as the stories and memories of your ancestors 200 years ago are to you now (do you even know the first names of those people?). 

We are the only people in the history of mankind that will know what the world was like in this time period we have been given; we are the only people in the history of this species to have first-hand experience on how life was lived in the year 2011. Historians that come after us, babies who are centuries from being born will grow up and analyze us, publishing Ph.D. theses about us, spending thousands of hours chronicling our lives and collecting information about a time period that to them will seem as far away as the Dark Ages do to us now.

Think of all the secrets you know, all the details of your childhood that you are the only one on earth who could recount, all the late nights you’ve had withfriends, all the lovers you have shared yourself with, all the road trips and all the times that you have screwed things up beyond repair. Times that to you make up the very fabric of your life, but times that given just two short generations will disappear from the records of the human mind utterly and completely. 

Over the years memories fade. They fade. I know of no more terrible and horrifying attribute for something as precious as a memory to have than susceptibility to the slow and irreparable degradation of time.

Ponder it for just a moment, your grandparents, how much do you really know about them? You may know their names, their addresses, their former occupations, their favorite singer, but what do you really know about them. What are their fondest memories from their childhood? What dreams and aspirations did they have about life when they were the age you are now? Did they realize such dreams? Are they content with their lives? Do they have any regrets? What are their plans and goals for the future? How would they like to be remembered once their gone? In this American society in which I was born we far underestimate the value of a human who has passed six or seven decades worth of life and memories on this planet. 

My great-grandmother Jackie who is still alive at the moment I write this will turn 106 this July; she remembers the Titanic sinking, she was already 39 years of age when Berlin fell to the Allies at the end of World War II, and during the infamous summer of love of 1969 (which I have spent countless time wishing I could have been 21 or 22 during) she celebrated her 64^thbirthday. She is truly the last of an almost entirely spent generation. She is one of such an infinitesimally small number of people who have seen and can still speak of the world before the roaring twenties. She was 13 years of age when World War I ended; how many people living in these days of the second decade of the 21^st century can speak of the end of World War I based on their personal account from memory? And yet soon, overwhelmingly and devastatingly soon, all that she knows of those days and that last shroud of memory from that day and age will fade from the earth for the remainder of time. Her fate and the fate of the golden and precious memories that accompany her are the same fate as the generation before hers, and the generation before that, and the generation of the present day. Indeed the generations who are yet to be born, the human beings who have not yet felt their first ray of sunlight, not yet experienced the touch of water or not yet drawn breath from our atmosphere are held to the same set of rules and the same ultimate fate. And yet there is no forewarning, no way to alert them to the precious gift of time and the irrecoverable blessing of youth. Their time will come, as will ours, as will soon that of my great grandmother.

As I was writing this, I found myself researching a word at thesaurus.com. The “quote of the day” which was proudly displayed to the right of the page was:

Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.

I thought about that statement for a moment and realized I couldn’t disagree more. Youth is absolutely a question of years. Yes, you can maintain shreds of your youth via your personality well into your old age and indeed some people do to seem to get “old” long before others, but numbers don’t lie and there is no viable replacement for youth to be found in the body of an 80 year old homo sapien. 

I have always been fascinated by the idea of two old people (say mid to late eighties for the sake of example) meeting and discovering the flame of attraction again. The realization that although their human emotions are still alive, their bodies are not there alongside them as they were in the days of their youth must be a terrible one indeed. I am not referencing sexual desire only, but all the physical aspects of love in one’s youth (ice skating together, vacationing together, etc, you can use your imagination). The line “if we had only met a half century earlier” echoes in my head; knowing just how thingscould have gone had those two souls met just at a different time period in their existence is a thought that hits deeper than I can adequately describe here. Time is a cruel if fair master of things and it does not pain it to leave an occasional reminder that it ultimately controls everything, even love. Although I find the concept amor vincit omnia to be as romantic as the next, I find the phrase tempus vincit omnia to strike closer to the reality of things.

The topic is heavy and it is uncomfortable to discuss, and yet in the end I firmly believe it needs discussing. The message in all this, the point to it all is that time is so inexplicably precious and so profoundly unrecoverable that we should treat every second of every day for exactly what it is. All humans have been given some time, some more and some less, but that is not for us to know. The only thing for us to know is that a thing so valuable and so easily squandered should never be treated as though it existed in interminable hoards.