This past week my last living uncle died. Uncle Ted was really old; nearly 100. With his passing I now have no living grandparents, parents, or parent siblings in my life. All dead.
Kinda weird, you know. I mean, I don’t know, it’s not like I had talked to Uncle Ted in the last… 30 years? It just hadn’t really occurred to me that he was the last. Not sure that it mattered.
I’m hardly the first to marvel at the passage of time. With that said I still marvel at it. When I was a wee lad, this poem/riddle blew me away when I read it:
This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.
I read it in The Hobbit when I was… fourteen? Mid 1970’s. It’s from Bilbo’s riddle game with Gollum. And I paused at the answer: Time.
Time…. My gosh. Yes.
Time as a force. Time as a merciless and undefeatable foe. And it was something I hadn’t considered really until that moment. Oh sure, one of my grandmothers had died already at that point, but you know I’m not sure what it had meant to me, but this articulated it in a way for some reason that did mean something.
And I saw, I think, for the first time, that the world, my world certainly, was finite.
I can’t speak for that fourteen year old anymore. God knows what he was thinking. But myself? I am conscious of the clock’s ticking. My writing is aware. It is both informed and terrified by it. Such that one can be stricken with paralysis by the knowledge of one’s looming mortality, and the precious nature of each moment. Like the bird in Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi which feigned it, I am mesmerized at times by it all.
Scott Macmann 