[DECEMBER 2007.]
This year I got freaked out about the brevity of human life, and apparently my response was to become extremely slow. I looked back at this year’s archives and there didn’t seem to be anything, but I always get disappointed when I look at my own archives. What did I need to remind myself of? Middle-to-late October was terrible, after that things evened out. Otherwise I just remember a lot of idle time I can’t account for, or couldn’t account for until I looked at metameat.vox.com and remembered that the whole damn year has been a second-order bookish year, with only a couple of breaks for extreme melodrama in the shrubbery. I guess more and more of my years are going to be like that. That all is OK but I would like to find a non-trivial way to document more of it.
2008 - get out more - body and mind. I might buy a bicycle and I will definitely try to do more pleasant things with this TCP/IP protocol we all enjoy.
When I have to get things done, it is always very late in the day that they are done. Sunset and lassitude. I finished my class, insanely, with a long list of things to do differently next time, and now it is like a railroad car rounding a bend and disclosing a whole new world of tasks, a delightful gemütlich little Swiss village of tasks to last a year, wafting smoke from their chimneys in answer to the train’s errant whistle.... I earned the wine tonight and I brook no reproach.
I was gone this weekend at a memorial service for an uncle. It was tastefully done, hard to watch my family grieving. To lose your son when you are seventy-six, eighty years old.
He had lived a life. It was documented, “full,” as in: even if it didn’t hang on one thread, you could point to a hazy boundary line inside which were those things that were him. Some of the speakers tried to account for that boundary. Even with the span of years complete, those accounts were provisional. Not inadequate, provisional. The sense of an ending. The sense in which a person is and is not like a powdered corpse laid out in his wedding suit.
He was in terrible physical pain for most of his life and seldom complained. Expecting it to be otherwise, that’s one wrong thing. We didn’t sign any papers, and no one is keeping our rights in a cave under lock and key. I guess if the heavenly spheres could talk, they would complain about their orbits.
My uncle’s widow had my sister read that chapter from First Corinthians, the one about agapē, that everyone reads at weddings these days. The King James text rendered it “charity”; this was the modern rendition “love.” I think charity is better. Broadly construed.
