2006-01-26

And I accept this in totality

Families grow and change and live and love and, eventually, they expire and make way for new families and existences. We are harvested like rows of teeth in a shark’s jaw, marching tediously out to greet the sea and to taste the flesh of life, until we are broken or useless, sinking, as surely as gravity, to the sand that no light sees. This is the startling impact of existence – that it is necessarily transitory, that we must move forward, ceaselessly and without say, until the day we move forward no longer. The world must have changed so many times already – and here I mean wholesale changes – perhaps unrecognizable they would be, these worlds come and gone, from the viewpoint of a detached observer. (Of course, we would recognize the mountains and the sea, the warm familiarity of a place our atoms have called home for longer, truly, than any of us can imagine; no, we would know this place, but we would not understand.)

We are all finding our way here, and it is difficult enough to navigate the changes that take place in one’s own life. There are the deaths of loved ones and the inner tragedies of love itself before we even mention career, achievement, daily motion, long distance travel, or the low points of down. Now just imagine: you were born before the rise of automobiles and you lived to see supersonic air travel; hasten back to the day you skinned your knees and heard the radio for the first time – and now, now we write letters and send them to each other instantaneously – there is no corner of the Earth to crawl from which no news can reach you. It is the death of romanticism and the birth of a new age that will need an observer not yet born in which to feel at home.

I want to run from it all, to take one last breath of this dying age and glimpse, where it is possible, the past before it was touched by our future. I imagine sailing south from Crete to the island of Gavdos (there are more remote places), to see this tiny nub whose margins are more than graspable and to find there a heart whose beats I call my own. I imagine living there for some time, pretending – and this word is not too much – that I am still living in that age where it was possible to go away and to know nothing of the place you called home – to know nothing of the very place that made you, to escape the gravity of those who define you!; and to go there, and to find out who you become.

I awoke from my slumber and this thought struck hard:

There will come a day when I will cease to walk the Earth.

And it shook me so.

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