Time passes, but the ephemeral survives
Time is on my mind these days. It occurred to me recently that I’ve now lived over a third of my life since my mother died; in less than two years I’ll be as old as she was when she died. She was such a significant figure in my life for so many years that it’s a bit unsettling to realize I’ve lived this much of my life without her. I’m not sure why, but realizing this makes the sense of my mortality more vivid somehow.
Actually, mortality doesn’t quite capture what’s on my mind. I think ephemerality (is that a word?) comes closer. (I’ll pause here to note that my spellchecker didn’t like “ephemerality”; it suggested both immorality and amorality as corrections. I don’t mean either of those words either.)
An old song by Paul Simon comes to mind.
Time, time, time
See what’s become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities
I was so hard to please
But look around
Leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter
Simon seems to suggest that not realizing those possibilities, being so hard to please, was somehow a waste. I can remember many roads not taken in my life — times when I considered doing something and decided it wasn’t quite right. In many of those cases, I spent a good bit of time agonizing over the question whether to take this road or that. I can also remember roads that I’ve taken, only to abandon them when I realized they were taking me places that I really didn’t want to go. Again, I spent time trying out possible lives, only to decide that those were really lives that I didn’t want to live.
Was I wasting all that time? Would I be a better version of the person I am now if I’d taken a more direct route to the life that I’m living and the person that I am?
My use of the term “waste” is not accidental. This is where I introduce another bit that sparked this line of thinking. It comes from Janna Malamud Smith:
…I observed to a colleague that one always wastes one’s life. How can we do otherwise when time is relentless, and as E. M. Forster once observed, we are performing on stage even as we are learning the instrument on which we perform? (An Absorbing Errand, p. 239).
Etymonline offers this etymology for the verb “waste”:
- 1200, wasten, “devastate, ravage, ruin,” from Anglo-French and Old North French waster “to waste, squander, spoil, ruin” (Old French gaster; Modern French gâter), altered (by influence of Frankish *wostjan) from Latin vastare “lay waste,” from vastus “empty, desolate.”
That’s pretty grim. I’ll grant that some of those wrong roads I took (I remember one in particular, but I’ll not pursue that here) were rather devastating. But “rehearsal” fits better than “waste”: I simply wouldn’t be the person I am now if I hadn’t taken, or considered taking, those roads. The roads and the experiences I had shaped me, and I carry them with me in the person that I am now. “See what’s become of me,” indeed.
If I were more literary, I’d introduce Faulkner here:
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.
Many of the webs in which I live and labor were spun before I was born; others were spun by me and those around me. That brings me full circle, back to thinking about my mother and the impact that she had on me. The impact is still there; it’s really not all that ephemeral.
