“A few million years ago, the present site of the city of
Chicago was buried under three kilometers of frost.” –Carl Sagan, Cosmos.
Buried under three kilometers of frost! Never escaping frost
despite the Spring, despite the Summer! Lifeless, cold, a wasteland. Oh, world!
How impermanent, how fragile everything is. All that I love-- the cracked calls
of the cardinal and the redwing, the various jade-golds of Spring grass and
Spring leaf, the perfect palate of a vital globe--all of it is so fleeting. If
it were only the case that I would not remain, the thought would not be so
heart-breaking; but to think that all of it must vapor?! To think that there
will come an end to seasons?! To think that there will come an end to the Earth
and its circling romance with the sun?! So hopelessly final!
And I here, bound
to the robins and the Spring grasses and the hum of a lawnmower, and an apple
tree newly in leaf; bound in the sublimest and most delicate communion of a
shared moment; suspended in the most tragic of all vessels, the inescapably
doomed ship of a finite moment in time.
I was alive with
the robins, in the days when Michigan was mitten-shaped and was full of Spring
grass. I was alive when stars glowed overhead in the night sky. I was alive
when there was a solar system with the sun at its center, a sun that warmed the
Earth and melted ice-cream in children’s hands. I was alive when there were
colors, and fellow men, and a language to name things. I was alive when there
was light. I was alive when there was matter. I was alive in the days of LOVE
and of BEAUTY. I was alive when birds migrated and butterflies emerged from
cocoons. I was alive when men smiled, and sang, and put their arms around one
another in friendship, and cared deeply about one another. I was alive when the
universe was expanding. I was alive when sunshine wrought freckles. I was alive
to hear poetry. I lived in the days of the chickadee, and the ocean, and the
hurricane. The tortoise was my companion, as was the mosquito and the whale.
The world has never known days like the ones in which I was alive.
We will all go.
The robins, the rivers, the poetry, the stars. We all lived together, and
though some of us will last longer than others, we will all go. Not a one of us
will last. We are even now a living memory.
Let me not forget
the communal bonds of time, the kinship of a shared temporality. All that is,
at this moment, is as a passenger on the same shipwreck-bound raft. Not a one
of us will survive. We are, every one of us, brothers in tragedy. It is all so
lovely and so…so…doomed. Like the beautiful consumptive in an old-fashioned novel whom we know, know from the first cough, must die.
The story cannot let her live. Even Horatio and the angels must perish. But we
were once in one another’s arms. The robins, and the Spring grasses, and the
stars, and the men embracing the ones that they loved—we were once all of the
same temporal piece. A shared experience. A shared memory. A moment in time.
