The wisdom of the hourglass: Time is short, Opportunity is limited. Get to it.
* * *
An hourglass stands next to my morning coffee. Its redeeming function is to clear the mental cobwebs from my morning fog. It speaks without sound, far superior to the morning news of politicians spewing vitriolic voodoo on the polarized and gullible public.
Today I hear words from the past, words from MacDonald Carey: “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of our Life.” These words are the prologue of the once addictive TV episodes, Days of our Lives, which ran from 1966 until it ran out of sand in 1994. Like political promises, only the reruns are now aired on TV. If you remember it, then your hourglass is running low on sand too.
My mother never missed an episode of this soap opera. She’d sit with her cup of coffee and allow herself to be subsumed into the lives of the actors. If you lived in a small South Georgia nowhere town, you’d find your own escape hatch from the insipid boredom of the place. Soaps are better addictions than alcohol, except at night.
We’re having our own current real-life episodes of such Days. Seems everyone is looking to create a Legacy of their life’s work. One groveling transitional wannabe is desperately attempting to cloak himself in the moth-eaten mantle of men whose sand ran out long ago and who exist by acronyms: FDR, JFK and LBJ. Even the sand in Shelly’s Ozymandias blew in:
My hourglass was a gift. It promised to provide a better meditative process than the yogic Om’s. Plus, it wouldn’t disturb the household while sitting on the floor in lotus, clothed in a white Indian loincloth and making a fool of myself.
For portending the future, the hourglass is inferior to tarot cards, horoscopes or even fortune cookies. It offers no promise of the future beyond the small grains of sand measuring a few vagrant minutes at best. At least the See Rock City fortune cookie offers some direction for the day.
Today, the hourglass seems like a bad omen. I watch as sands of time slip silently into the bowels of the hourglass. The sand leaves no trail but slides seamlessly through the narrow neck, settling itself into the bosom of silent nothingness. Like time itself, it leaves no trail in its passing. Omar Khayyam offered these words:
“The worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes—or it prospers; and anon, like snow upon the deserts dusty face, lighting a little hour or two—is gone.”
Unlike Sullivan’s theorem, ‘form follows function,’ it’s hard to say just what function an hourglass performs. It’s useless as a sand clock, unless one subscribes to the notion that it’s one of Plato’s Perfect Patterns.
The peripatetic philosopher’s hypothesis suggests that in the heavenly spheres there’s a perfect pattern of all things, of which on earth everything’s an imperfect replica. It’s hard to get a grip on esoterica. Plato obviously never observed NFL cheer leaders, or he would have seen the flaws in his speculation. Perfection is clearly in the eye of the beholder.
There are some trivial uses of the hourglass. I once had a small pocket-sized one, a three-minute timer. The glass was encased in brass. It substituted for a stopwatch for timing long-winded, charge-by-the-word lawyers and lectures on the wages of sin.
Some swear the hourglass is helpful for redeeming the time, an unproven and half-baked concept. Whistling Dixie does a better job. And if you think resurrection is possible in this body, remember, Cryonics is still a work in progress. I doubt we’ll see Stalin or Mao rise from their glass encasements any time soon.
I feel some remorse for the hourglass. It’s become mostly irrelevant in this technological age. It’s still good for timing 3-minute eggs. It was formerly good for describing the bodily shapes of people. But alas, even this use has run its course. American physiques are now best described by the shape of fruit, particularly pears.
In the cosmic scheme of things, Time, if it exists at all, is measured by eons and not by grains of sand. As for us, well, it’s still dust unto dust…and it’s always later than we think.
As for Legacy, Building Back Better Beyond is a better bet.
Bud Hearn
October
8, 2021
No comments:
Post a Comment