Being ill (to paraphrase Samuel Johnson) concentrates the
mind wonderfully. You find yourself thinking about all kinds of things very
differently.
Priorities, for example. What’s important? Is my job important?
Earning a salary, yes of course it’s important to me, I need food and lodging
and all kinds of incidentals. But am I making a difference in the world, or
bettering the human race, by working at my job? Hmm. Probably not.
How about the things I do every day? The little tasks I
undertake in my job (which can be very petty). The back-and-forth at home:
clean this, put that away, arrange this. Important? No. But I do them anyway.
I am reluctant to waste time, but now I have time on my hands,
and it makes me thoughtful about all kinds of things. History is suddenly very
appealing to me. So is children’s literature, which seems to me to be more
immediate and more important than sober grown-up literature (except for poetry).
And suddenly I’m listening to music
again, and it’s very satisfying.
Maybe just thinking
is important. Maybe just writing this stupid blog is important. Maybe talking
to people is important. Maybe love is important.
I have lived in Providence for over thirty-five years, and I
love every dreary block and corner of it. But I looked up at the skyline the
other day, and thought: it’s just a city. There have been hundreds of thousands
of cities in the history of the world; most of them have tumbled into dust and
are forgotten now. This one will be forgotten too, someday.
Sub specie
aeternitatis means “under the aspect of eternity.” It indicates looking at
something from outside of time, without regard to the present moment or its
little difficulties.
As Partner and I are fond of quoting to one another in
moments of acceptance: “In a hundred years, all new people.”
And in a thousand years, probably mostly new cities and mostly
new national borders and probably also some pretty wild new seacoasts.
In ten thousand years, all new countries, and possibly
people with gills and flippers.
Makes you a little vertiginous, doesn’t it?
This is a very long quote, but a very good one. Please bear
with me.
There came over me a feeling of profound fatigue at the realization
that all this long stretch of time not only had been uninterruptedly lived,
thought, secreted by me, that it was my life, my very self, but also that I
must, every minute of my life, keep it closely by me, that it upheld me, that I
was perched on its dizzying summit, that I could not move without carrying it
about with me.
I now understood why it was that the Duc de Guermantes, whom, as I
looked at him sitting in a chair, I marveled to find him shewing his age so
little, although he had so many more years than I beneath him, as soon as he
rose and tried to stand erect, had tottered on trembling limbs . . . and had wavered as he made his way
across the difficult summit of his eighty-three years, as if men were perched
on giant stilts, sometimes taller than church spires, constantly growing and
finally rendering their progress so difficult and perilous that they suddenly
fall. I was alarmed that mine were already so tall beneath my feet; it did not
seem as if I should have the strength to carry much longer attached to me that
past which already extended so far down and which I was bearing so painfully
within me! . . . .
We are all on stilts, which grow higher and higher,
“sometimes taller than church spires. “
We might fall suddenly.
But the view is spectacular.
