Another (New) Year

New Year is one of our most curious holidays. Of course it’s a cliché that any new year (or new day or week or month or decade or whatever) is an arbitrary marker of time that designates nothing in relation to the continuum of change that happens above and beyond our perception of that which we can’t perceive. We – and our world – are constantly changing on micro and macro levels, mostly unseen. So we’ve invented time to help us mark our life’s changes. Yes, there is some astrological relation to our notion of time (our planet just completed another revolution around the sun). More to an understanding of our change might be the physical, observable markers – the turning of leaves in fall, the falling snow in winter, the greening grass in spring – our first broken bone, our first sexual encounter, marriage, a child’s birth, a grandchild’s birth, a knee replacement, the death of a parent, a move into a nursing home, the death of a spouse. But of course those would be (and are) personal markers. So we’ve constructed these cultural markers of time (days, weeks, months, years) to help us with a larger cultural, shared understanding of the movement from birth to death. And the year is a moderate, comprehensible unit to contemplate within the infinity from here to there within a life. Although whether “New” is the best adjective to describe it might be questionable. Perhaps “Another” would be more appropriate. As in, “Happy Another Year!”

10th Anniversary of 9/11

The 10^th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States have been (surprisingly) sober, calm, and reflective, with only minimal jingoism (and that being mostly surrounding the various sporting events, which I’m sure felt the need to tie a patriotic bow around their making millions of dollars exploiting the remembrance). What strikes me about the various TV specials and newspaper commemorations is the sense – sometimes explicitly stated – of “never forget,” that 9/11 will be forever in our national consciousness, that the ceremonies and memorials we gathered around today will be gathered around year after year, decade after decade in perpetuity. But of course that won’t be the case. We remember now because we are so close to the horrific events of that day and are still living the effects lingering from that day. The survivors and the families of the dead are still alive, as are the politicians and others of authority on that day. The memorials are fresh (and some not yet even completed). The images are from our memory, not history. But in time the images and memorials will be history, as those of us who experienced the day, directly or from an all-to-near distance (most of us now living), are gone. That’s just the nature of time, of history, of memory. On December 7^th or June 6^th, we as a nation pay little notice anymore to the memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Normandy invasion, and haven’t for at least several decades. What makes us think that in 50 years, or 100 years, when most all of us are gone, September 11^th won’t be just another day in the week for most Americans (assuming there are still Americans 50 or 100 years from now). Time and history move forward, and memory fades. That’s not to lessen the import of September 11^th. But all is transient, and what seems so permanent and forever now (“never forget”) is actually only blowing along the surface of a shifting sand.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

“Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley

Here, There, and Everywhere

I sit in a hotel room in Mumbai, the sun setting, the evening BBC World News muted on the TV, listening online to NPR’s “Morning Edition,” reading tonight this morning’s New York Times and Washington Post. I just happened this afternoon to have bought a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, in which he muses on the relativity of time and space, as I experience it in real time and real space.