Saturday, March 21, 2009

Yesterday I turned 39. No surprises or revelations, just a sense of what it's like to keep growing older, an understanding that the tired phrase life goes on is tired because it's true. Of course, one's sense of time fluctuates, expanding and contracting, depending on the intensity of experience at that moment, depending on how much the world is defying or agreeing with you, but in all cases, things keep happening. Somewhat like no matter where you go, there you are. Both phrases are trivially true in an all-too-universal way. Perhaps the thing that distinguishes the old from the young is the knowledge that the truth of these phrases isn't trivial, because having a sense of how they are true only comes with experience, and experience only comes with age, and age implies death.

1 comment:

wendy lewis said...

Nice work.

Here's a little belated present for you in kind from Paul Celan.

Fallow-voiced, lashed
forth from the depth:
no word, no thing,
and either's unique name,

primed in you for falling
primed in you for flying

sore gain
of a world.


Carry on, my friend. xx