time of attrition
It was thirty years since I had walked onto the down-stepping path that leads to a house that time has not touched. As I turned a corner my eye caught a figure passing almost alongside me. It was a somewhat elderly man, dressed casually like me, thinning white hair stirring in the breeze, round-framed glasses balancing on his nose, eyes looking out of from deeply formed bags — then came the shock of recognition: that old man, reflected off a window, was me!
There I was looking upon a scene with the same vision of thirty years ago. I was seeing with the visual sense of my eternally younger self. This realization, this reality transformation, must have occurred over the course of unwitting time. Age had crept on me not unawares but not truly acknowledged. Until that moment I had been careening about my world observing everything and everyone from an outdated, feckless vantage. And I was relating to that world as a being from places that time, my time, should have forgot. Or at least adjusted contemporaneously. Who was I? What had I become?
How does one account for this insidious slippage of time, of personal, experiential time? Ed Yong in his book An Immense World describes how sensory input and its transfer into the brains of different animals results in world views that differ not just dramatically but fundamentally, so much so that even though we may inhabit the same space each of us, each animal, has experiences in that space that seem like another world altogether. Even time is measured and witnessed from completely different internal clocks.
What I wonder is this: does our experience of our lived-through space-time continuant change with the passage of time. We have all known extremely extended periods of time while in a dentist’s chair and very brief moments of time spent laughing with friends. That temporal elasticity is our common, every day fare. And by the time we reach our sixth decade the previous decade, ten full years, seems literally years shorter — a brief few moments of time — infinitely shorter than the four endlessly long years of high school.
Is this, then, why our internal perception of ourself remains fixed to our youth. As if time sped by, out-racing our persistent sense of self in all its dimensions: physical, mental, moral, even emotional. This persistence of self awareness remains glued to the frame that essentially framed it when it came into formation. Sometime in our youth, somewhere in that personal space-time, when ideas and ideals and even music preferences and concepts of the beautiful and sexual object attractions—all that—gets formulated and pasted into our minds. Time will do little to change that. And so we cannot account for the arrival, later on, of the confrontation with ourselves as old. Old in appearance, old in manner and attitude, old in the eyes of everyone around us.
This saddening truth will continue to strike us anew, proving again and again that self-awareness is a steeled fortress difficult to penetrate, probably impossible to dismantle or re-configure. Stuck in a past with no use and little relevance, unredeemable losses accrued over the years, the many years, we do not face the now limited future. We stare at it in compliant wonder. What, all the possibilities that were tied to our youthful self, now seem to be draining away. Almost rapidly diminishing. How do we face the next tomorrow? When tomorrows are filing toward a count-down. Every other animal species, Ed Yong seems to declare, share no awareness of a future. But we have always been playing and wheedling and improvising and wrestling with our futures. In our long-ago time the future seemed unbounded, even though rationally, we were always aware that our death awaited us, just not now, maybe (somehow) never.
The good news, for those of us fortunate enough to have banked sufficient positive memories, is our own personal gospel: we may each individually redeem ourselves with our compiled memories, hoping for the best redemption we can offer ourselves.
And, mirror be damned, we remain true to ourselves, warts and all, and calmly carry on.
