Time

Today while reading a book by Santayana, acquired from my late grandfather's library, I found an old hotel receipt folded in fourths.

Park Royal Hotel
23 W 73rd Street
New York, NY
Mr. O.E. Stimpson
Apartment 1214
$15.75
PAID
July 21, 1961

Scenting the past on musty paper, I suddenly saw my grandfather, not much older than I am now, reading Santayana by his hotel window, above the muffled shouts and beeping of New York streets. He marks his place with his receipt, but fifty years later, I, not he, resume his reading. A crumbling receipt is a durable memento precisely through not intending to be. Posed photographs of my grandfather merely link me to his generic representation, but a dated scrap of paper captures the real man, caught unawares in a moment of casual existence.

Likewise, antiquity's great monuments are not as touching as the hair combs, spoons, and wash basins dug up from buried villages by archaeologists. By recalling the dead in their ordinary lives, the least significant objects make the most significant memorials. Time hallows routines into relics.

Oddly, long periods of time go by faster than short ones. From the vantage of Monday morning, Friday evening seems hopelessly distant, yet I just turned thirty, and twenty feels like yesterday. The hours creep but the years fly. Looking closer, I see that the years fly because the hours creep. The slow repetition of days and weeks lulls us into thinking time is stationary, then one day we find the days have made a decade. The train left the platform too quietly to notice, and now we glance up to see our hometown gone, new country all around us.

Space is the dimension of human greatness, time of human nothingness. Space is a dimension under constant conquest. The wheel, ship, chariot, train, truck, and space shuttle are humanity's inventory of ever-improving weapons. Born on a clump of grass in the African savannah, we quickly spread out from Spain to Siberia. When we reached the edge of Australia, undeterred, we rafted to Hawaii. When there were no more oceans to cross, we made the moon our mission. Today, with television and the internet, rather than travel we command the world into our living rooms. Yet, to complement these conquests of distance, what single victory have we scored against time? Though technology can get us to New York by lunch, it cannot slow one tick of the ironclad seconds that count down to death. Our freedom in space is like a bottle's freedom to roll side to side on a conveyor belt carrying it toward a trash heap.

At the funerals of the young, grief is raw and chaotic. Young people being the limbs and liveliness of the world, the death of the young amputates the world, and the mourners' grief is like the howling of an amputee. In contrast, the funerals of the old are more solemn than horrific. Why beat one's breast at the inevitable? On closer inspection, this solemnity for the old is a muted grieving for the young, that is, for the young of fifty years ago, on whose world the barely cracked door claps shut when the elderly die. Fifty years ago, the hunched and white-haired hobblers of the present were in their prime, making laws and making loans and making love, when today's movers and makers were still asleep in the lampless anteroom of the future. The sun shone on a world that, with the elderly's death, no one left living now remembers except through lifeless books and black-and-white photographs. As the coffin is lowered, not only a person but an era is laid to rest.

Each stage of life greatly pleases us, but unfortunately not while we are in it. The young are eager to be adults, adults look forward to being retired, the retired envy youth. Daters crave marital stability, the married miss the thrill of dating. College students and graduates would swap places. We possess the pieces of a happy life, but we cherish them out of sequence.

A book I am reading notes that the idea of being "modern" originated in the Middle Ages. It is odd to think of flagellating monks and Canterbury pilgrims regarding themselves as modern. Even odder to think how, like them, we moderns will one day seem medieval. In a few hundred years, today's books will appear silly with their solemn talk of the modern world. A book about recent trends in capitalism will sound as contemporary as a book about recent trends in feudalism. "The War on Terrorism" will have the ring of "the War of the Roses." Solar energy will be as cutting edge as firewood.