Sunday, July 20, 2008
Mulling
I recently passed a milestone birthday – that is, one of those evenly divisible by ten – and it will surprise no one if I say this was an occasion for some deep and not always optimistic thought. A few milestones ago my friend Hank made a card for me that showed a glass with liquid up to the halfway mark. “Don’t think of it as half empty” read the cover. Then inside: “Think of it as half dead.”
But in a nice way.
Still, that’s the point, no? One has lived some unknowable fraction of one’s mortal span. And it is, for most of us, unknowable, despite Housman’s arithmetic:
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodland I will go,
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Carpe that frickin’ diem, hoss.
But in a nice way.
Still, that’s the point, no? One has lived some unknowable fraction of one’s mortal span. And it is, for most of us, unknowable, despite Housman’s arithmetic:
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodland I will go,
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Carpe that frickin’ diem, hoss.
