I am thinking about time. It seems to elude me - it passes quickly, full of demands, the arrival of evening a relief, the morning approaching all too soon. I wish whole days away. 'How are you?' people ask. 'I'll be better when today is over.' Before you know it a week has gone, a month, another year. A horrible cliché! But, still, it is relentless and demoralising.
To talk about time as a river is also a commonplace but exactly what image does the comparison evoke for you? In this dejected mood, I imagine myself thrown about on the violent water, waiting for the boat to capsize and the crew of one to perish. Occasionally I see myself watching from the bank in the knowledge that one day the stream will cease to run and the mud on the river bed will dry out and scatter in the wind. 'Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.' (This is Thoreau in Walden.) 'I drink at it, but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.' I love Thoreau. I would like to talk with him but it's possible we wouldn't get on.
The shallow stream: 'Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.' Thoreau writes passionately about time, and, a little later, talks about moments when he felt unwilling - 'could not afford', in fact - 'to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands'. On days like these, he would sit in his doorway all day long, 'in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted through the house.' Is this what it is to fish in time's stream or in the sky, whose bed is 'pebbly with stars'?
Right now I am tangled up in Thoreau's words, hopeful but sceptical, even a little perplexed. I have no idea of how one fishes in time's stream. I cannot imagine myself sitting all day in the doorway. I am not convinced that I could tie the knots, cast the line, wait with the confident patience that is necessary for the angler-in-the-sky. Time is on my mind but rarely have I heard anyone speak about it in a way that means very much to me. The days are intractable and the idea of dropping a hook in and waiting seems a beautiful but difficult idea. Well, 'so it goes'. (A tag from a book about time but not one that speaks about fishing, I fear.)
Enough for this morning. Shower, shave, and wade out once again into the river.
Co-incidentially I felt too tired to comment on your blog yesterday.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a long post just now about being dejected in Ghent and then I lost it which made me feel a little more dejected. The post was quite poetic though. I said something about although the conference was on urban multilingualism and was supposed to be interesting somehow I kept slipping out of keynotes and wandering about by canals on wet cobbles. That was a good bit of the lost post. There was also a bit about lost art and getting lost. In the end I decided this state of mild depression was maybe common and ordinary and also similar to the state of those who fish. Being out of sorts is also a bit like being out of time, stuck in a foreign city time weighs heavily but there is also lots of it which is a different feeling from everyday time. This expanse of time feels a bit much, but perhaps I should embrace Thoreau's philosophy and enjoy it more. I do think tracking the thoughts and being aware of the slightly less good things in life is interesting though thank you for this Richard.
This post was done on my birthday and therefore I think that its content is very appropriate. With birthdays people have a tendency to complain that they are 'getting older' or they worry about what they feel that they should have achieved by then. But I always like to focus on the 'many happy returns' part of birthdays, the wish that you will celebrate this day with your friend many times over and that even though this wish marks the passing of time it is a hopeful future. When I was young I was incredibly accident prone which resulted in many trips to A and E but I have become better at limiting my clumsiness as I have got older. For this reason my sister in particular would congratulate me on 'surviving' another year.
ReplyDeleteSomeone said to me recently 'to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive', one of those aphorisms that Hoggart talks of as counters perhaps, but one that links with what I have been reading of Bloch. You cannot grasp the present, so you must always be looking to the future? I like Thoreau's thoughts 'to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands' it seems that the present itself is too much for him, not the future?