Time's Flavor

I’ve spent 64 years of my life in the 20th century. The time just ahead of mine was my mother’s and father’s. When visiting with my grandmother, on the paternal side, she whose hair went all the way to the floor when she combed it in the mornings, I was with someone who had seen the light of day in the 19th and, for many years, when she said “Today,” it was another time than mine, a time with another flavor. A very thin, very unsteady, very withered ancient old lady lived with my grandmother—her own mother. A year or two after we children met her, she passed away. She’d spent most of her years (probably more than my 64) in the 19th, the century that ushered in the two World Wars with its passing…probably unaware what she was causing. The 19th was an odd time, a kind of renaissance of something that will eventually develop fully in my own future time: another time, another season.

Time has a flavor. Of course it’s constructed of memories. And children’s are more sunny than those of octogenarians. The late 1930s therefore were more bright and shiny than the 2019s will be for me: miry jungle, too much dark. I make this note because a few days ago someone young referred back to the twentieth in tones that I recognized as being similar to mine when thinking of the 19th. Already! The 21st has barely begun—but it is already labeling the 20th as “the past.” And so it is. So it is. Never mind the monstrosities and glories that it showed a stumbling humanity on its way to Eternity. Yes; one wonders about Eternity’s flavor in one’s eighties.

Sober Second

The second day of this or any other new year illustrates Nature’s “No comment” take on the human adulation of symbolic transitions. Yesterday was brilliantly sunny. To be sure by evening the sky had clouded up so that the much heralded Supermoon on New Year’s eve was hidden. Today, on the second, everything is very cold and properly grey again. From my upstairs typing spot, where the view is of my roof, the active of my three chimneys is shown producing the fog of smoke. Snow’s everywhere, showing its dirt; this is old snow, folks. New stuff is supposed to come, but as yet the three flakes I’ve seen were just a half-hearted test run.

Every year we joke about “last year,” meaning five minutes ago—as Times Square is made the stage for not very funny jokes by Media folk. And the bedroom, when you reach it, at 0:05 am, might just as well be 2014, 2015 or any other year in recent memory. Nature is wiser than we are. Time must have a stop, to be sure. But there is no time in Nature. What Nature shows is cold-eyed endurance, especially this time of year.

The third will be even more normal, no doubt; and 2018 will therefore really be here: a change in our accounting. Even years are what? Luckier? More trying? Look out the window. Neither luck nor doom are visible.

Concerning supermoons, by the way, this site has two posts; the first, here, explains what they are; the second, here, corrects an error made in the first. 

The Month Has Fled

The month has fled, where has it gone?

Memory draws lines each night

And starts a new one every dawn.

Potter-like it fashions Time

Its turning wheel the sun’s new light

Each day a line, each month a rhyme,

In language that is not quite clear

Until at death we leave this sphere.

1/31 Syndrome

I was fairly convinced that, since starting this blog (on 2/7/2009), I had said pretty much the same thing every January 31 that followed—namely that today is peculiarly suited to wonder about the passage of time. That turns out to be wrong. Entries for 2011 and 2013 do make references to time, not the entries in other years. Perhaps my urge to mark the time (so to say) only comes in odd years.

The syndrome is easy to explain. Christmas, New Years, and Epiphany powerfully remind us of time’s passage. Thereafter the new year earnestly begins. For those who’re in the workforce, serious attention to the profession or occupation resumes with but a rather fuzzy holiday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day (which is only really half-observed), causing a half-stop. Then, suddenly, it is the 31st, and around here you’ll hear both Brigitte and me muttering to ourselves, “Jeez. January’s over. Where has it gone?”

Something that comes with advanced age is the feeling of time speeding up. I’m aware that saying that I’m contradicting myself. I don’t really believe in the so-called flow of time. Time, for me is simply duration. Therefore what I’m sure I mean is that the world is moving ever faster—or that the public message that comes from the civilization is quite unaware of repeating phenomena like seasons. Whereas, one might argue, as in childhood so in oldhood. Therefore for us the seasons are ever more meaningful again, much as they were in our youth. And the stuff between them rushes on, rushes, runs, races. And the end of January therefore shocks us to awareness of something. Call it a syndrome. The neatest definition of that word is “a place where several roads meet.” But what are their names?

That Time of Night

Having just last night heard Miss Marple refer to a fortnight, made me curious about the origins of that word. I learned that its rooting is “fourteen nights,” with fourteen contracted. Evidently it was ancient Germanic custom to count time by nights. Sennight was also once used in English, meaning “seven nights”; but that word is now classed as—the direction in which fortnight appears to be trending. To be sure, while laboring at Gale Research, which had its roots in old-fashioned publishing, senior editors and such were required to file fortnightly reports… This made me nod. We have two choices: count time by day or by night. Sure enough, such is human diversity over time, once in Germanic lands nights were the basis of counting. Online Etymology Dictionary tells me that Tacitus (56-117) made a note of this back in his own time. Mankind has followed every conceivable conceptual path available. One that came up in our morning discussion was the fact that one branch of Mazdaism, Zurvanism, held that God was Time. Time is a mysterious enough experience to stimulate human innovation.

So Long

There is something basic in human beings that is at war with time. I got my introduction to this concept ages ago now reading a novel by Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop (1944). That title comes from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act 1, Scene 4:

Hotspur (Henry Percy).

O, Harry, thou hast robb’d me of my youth!

I better brook the loss of brittle life

Than those proud titles thou hast won of me;

They wound my thoughts worse than sword my flesh:

But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool;

And time, that takes survey of all the world,

Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy,

But that the earthy and cold hand of death

Lies on my tongue: no, Percy, thou art dust

And food for—

[Dies]

Henry V.

For worm, dear Percy…

A year after writing his novel, Huxley published The Perennial Philosophy. In that book he treats of this subject at much greater length in Chapter XII, Time and Eternity. Here he quotes a panoply of spiritual writers, among the Rumi, St. John of the Cross, and Meister Eckhart. The Eckhart quote follows:

Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. And not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but termporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.

Well and good, one might say. Well and good for poets of high rank , for mystics. But does this feeling permeate all of humanity as well? Does it also touch that “temporal affections” that Eckhart views as yet another barrier born of time? I would assert that it does—and the easiest way to prove that is to look at the words we use to say good-bye.

Time plays a significant role in most of the phrases used. Hasta la vista. That may be translated, with generous unpacking, as [May the] view [of you] rapidly return. The German Auf Wiedersehn also evokes seeing, which is here and now, in the present, and time by reference to “again.” Until [we] see [one another] again. A rividerci, of course, says the same thing; the Italian phrase has us re-seeing. The Hungarian Viszontlátás is identical to both of these; látás is vision, viszont is again. The Japanese Sayonara has much the same basic meaning, but the structure is expressed with more subtlety. The word comes from sayo, meaning “thus” followed by nara, meaning “if it be, indeed”: [We shall be] thus, [together,] if it [is to] be, indeed. Along with such English phrases as See you soon and ‘Til later, we are dealing here with what might be called secular expressions of the inner wish that it might be well if time would cease when we desire to be with those we care for.

A more religious or transcending phrasing has reference to God. The French Adieu preserves this meaning most directly. It might be fleshed out as [I hand you over] to God [while time separates us]. But the same idea is also present in Goodbye, although it is much more compressed. It is a compression of God be with ye. And then there is that most compressed and totally casual German “bye,” Tschüss. When spoken it sounds almost like an imitation of a brief sneeze. So where does that Tschüss come from? It entered the German language from Walloon, the romance language of a part of Belgium. The word there is adjüs—the Walloon way of pronouncing adieu. Virtually no German-speaker knows the root of Tschüss.

When we are at last with God, we’ll always be together. So long.