Rick's February Tirade
On the Treachery of Time
Unlike clams and badgers -- unlike any other known life-forms on this planet
-- the human animal requires a palette of brightly colored illusions to
overpaint the dark-hued canvas of reality. We like to believe, for example, that
the creator of the universe knows our names and grants our wishes much like
Santa Claus, in whom we'd also like to believe. We pursue impossible dreams and
refuse to wake up when the alarm goes off. We respond to direct-mail sweepstakes
in search of riches, though our odds of winning are approximately those of a
chicken attempting to fly nonstop from New York to Lisbon.
One of the happy deceptions our species likes to perpetrate on itself is the
notion that time is circular, like a hula hoop -- or better yet, like a Ferris
wheel that whisks us around and safely deposits us back where we started. We
admit to the existence of only seven distinct days, cobbled together in an
endless repeating loop. We even call them affectionately by name, as if they
were drinking buddies or Snow White's dwarfs. Every week we see them again,
these seven old friends. Monday arrives as always, dutiful and demanding;
Tuesday is a tolerable bore; Friday fills us with a spirit of ripe expectancy;
Saturday is an unabashed hedonist who likes to shop. We perceive that Sunday has
a quality of Sundayness that no other day can match. Then we start the loop all
over again. We delude ourselves, of course.
Our home planet actively assists in the deception. Those of us who dwell in
the temperate zones enjoy an annual pageant of seasons -- the same four episodes
viewed over and over again in a delightful procession of snowdrifts, drenching
rain, infernal heat and withered leaves. We've thought up friendly names for
them, too. Ditto for the twelve months that are supposed to correspond roughly
with the cycles of the moon. Circles within circles within circles.
We haven't gone so far as to name the hours of the day (it might be fun to
say, "The time is now half past Winona"), but we've done something just as
eccentric: we've numbered them only as far as twelve. Twenty-four hours but only
twelve numbers -- as if we can't endure a whole day without a comforting
repetition, as if our clocks are telling us that the dark hours of night are
simply daylight hours in pajamas. We've even made our clocks circular, so that
each day ends precisely where it began. We keep little Ferris wheels on our
kitchen walls.
Year after year, we continue to enjoy the soothing illusion that nothing has
changed... that the great circle of time keeps us safe in its maternal embrace.
Birthdays, anniversaries, Halloween, the Ides of March, legal and illegal
holidays all pop from our calendars on schedule, as if to reassure us that we're
back in our familiar old neighborhood. We almost expect to see our former
playmates trotting off to school with their yellow rubberized raincoats and Lone
Ranger lunchboxes.
The birthdays should be a tip-off: though they arrive at the same time each
year, they pretty obviously leave us a year older. We're suddenly conscious, for
one day at least, that maybe we've been hoodwinked. Time isn't a benevolent
circle after all; it's more like a ruthless shark, always moving, always
devouring the tasty morsels of life in its path. There's no returning to the
badminton nets of our youthful summers; no "do-overs" for the time we muffed our
first date with Betty Sue Blackwood. The past recedes along with our dead dogs
and grandparents, along with Napoleon and Josephine, Lucy and Desi, the
forgotten inhabitants of Babylon, the lost mammals of the Pleistocene, and the
quivering creatures that crawled out of the primordial sea.
It's bad enough that we can't revisit the past except in the form of
gelatinous memories with wobbly outlines; even worse is the spectacle of what
happens to our mortal bodies as we're propelled into the future. We're forced to
watch time wrest our youth from us like a schoolyard bully relieving us of our
lunch money. We resist for a while, aided by low-fat diets, gym workouts and
bouts of heroic sex, but eventually time forces our fists open and collects its
tribute money. We begin to change perceptibly.
I recently observed a birthday beyond which those changes are rarely for the
better. In fact, at my age a general deterioration seems almost as inevitable as
the tendency of public statues to attract pigeons. I've crossed the half-century
mark, and already I feel the whoosh of sooty grey wings around my shoulders.
I find it absurd that I'm now closer to eighty than twenty, closer to ninety
than ten. I could swear it was only a few moons ago that I was flipping baseball
cards and impersonating Jimmy Durante in front of my fifth-grade class. Now I
have little dark hairs sprouting from various parts of my ears. The inner
ten-year-old recoils at the reading glasses, the first flecks of silver in the
eyebrows, the widening bald spot atop the noggin.
The fifties are like a toaster: in goes a supple young man, out pops a dried
OLD man ready to be consumed -- assuming he pops out at all. Over the coming
years I can look forward to liver spots, knobby hands, gout, phlebitis, drooping
jowls, ascendant blood pressure and calcified arteries, digestive miseries,
prostate and bladder complaints, conjugal ineptitude, faulty hearing, tired
tastebuds, clouded cataracts, sadistic joints, free radicals overtaking my cells
and mental sludge clogging my soul. I've already shrunk half an inch from my
proud six-foot stature, and I guarantee you that I'll be shrinking even more
before the story's over. By contrast, my ears and feet will be expanding beyond
their current dimensions, as will my already Homeric nose. Before long I could
be reprising my Jimmy Durante routine without makeup.
It doesn't seem possible that I've already outlived Enrico Caruso and James
A. Garfield, Tsar Nicholas II and Attila the Hun. When Chopin was my age, he had
already been mouldering in his box for over ten years. Errol Flynn -- the
quintessential Hollywood swashbuckler and merrymaker -- suffered a fatal heart
attack at fifty while making merry with a female acquaintance. At my age
Shakespeare was a retired burgher in Stratford, with a mere two years left to
strut, wordless, upon this worldly stage.
Too many notable writers have shuffled off before fifty, including F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson, Poe, Kafka, Chekhov, Jane Austen, all the
Brontes, Baudelaire, Jack London, D.H. Lawrence and George Orwell, not to
mention Kahlil Gibran. They had already completed the bodies of work for which
we revere them. If you want to glimpse the body of my work at fifty, you'll have
to make do with a thesaurus for advertising copywriters, an out-of-print humor
book, a batch of online tirades and a four-foot shelf of catalogs. If I were to
keel over tomorrow I'd be less famous than Day-Timers' Western Coach Cowhide
binder.
It's already too late for me to become a circus acrobat or a nuclear
physicist. By my age most mathematicians are virtually in their dotage, while
lyric poets are creatively if not literally dead. The passions subside, leaving
pale embers in the furnace of the soul. As a middlebrow essayist I should be
able to weave my woolly word-tapestries for a few more seasons, though my brain
has already ceased to teem and I struggle to find three synonyms for
"detestable."
Even more troubling than the forward march of time is its damnable tendency
to accelerate as we age. To a child of six, one year is an entire universe of
discovery and jubilation, a vast arena in which every experience tastes like a
delightful new ice cream flavor. Peach today, peppermint crunch tomorrow. A year
represents a massive chunk of a child's life. To a veteran of fifty campaigns, a
year encompasses a mere two percent of the territory, a barely perceptible blip
of forgotten meals, talking heads and immemorial chores. Days metamorphose into
weeks, weeks into months, months into years. Think of the time we spend checking
our e-mail, flossing, grocery shopping, nodding off during business meetings, or
perusing the sports section of our newspaper for the thousandth consecutive day.
Add up all those forgettable moments and it's no wonder that middle-aged folks
have been known to misplace entire decades.
We're not without weapons in the war against time. We snatch temporary
victories by creating sublime moments, like canoeing by moonlight or making love
upon an Alp. But the memories of such moments recede eventually like so many
depleted hairlines. We can fill our lives with the love of family and friends,
but even our favorite people tend to mutate over time, sometimes into odd and
unrecognizable shapes. We can console ourselves that we're growing in wisdom,
even while we lose our mental dexterity and valuable I.Q. points. We can reap
the spoils of our achievements, but most achievements grow prematurely old.
Whether we've built a solid plateau of a life or a succession of little peaks,
it all passes away at an alarming pace.
We're sledders upon a snowy slope, all of us, headed down a long run over a
field of dazzling white into a dark forest below. We dig the sled's runners into
the snow, push off with our boots and down we go, leisurely at first, gripping
the polished wood with our gloves and braving the good cold sting of icy flakes
in our faces, hearing the gleeful yips of our friends, exulting in the clean
frosty air and cerulean sky, the sunlight reflecting off the snow, the pale blue
tree-shadows crossing our path as we gain speed.
Now gravity pulls us into a steeper and faster descent, still exhilarating
but more demanding, as we narrow our focus to the path ahead, dodging the
occasional trees that poke up from the slope. The trees grow thicker now as we
speed downward; we begin to spot the bodies of the luckless ones who crashed or
overturned, the bleached and grinning husks of former kids who came to grief in
mid-slope. We pass them, we pass everything in a blur as we accelerate, still in
control but plunging toward the deep groves ahead. More trees, more bodies... we
keep swerving and dodging as the trees ahead grow dense and grey in the rising
mist. Nobody ever survives the lower slope; a wall of trees rushes toward us as
we close our eyes and run out of time.
Heartless time. Treacherous time. Time the creator, time the devourer. What
can we do except enjoy the descent? And keep dodging those trees until we can't
dodge them any longer.
I've just looked up at my kitchen clock -- one of those ingenious birdsong
models that have delighted catalog merchandisers for the past few years. Two in
the morning, says the friendly face. Now the mockingbird has chirped its
melodious greeting, just as it does at two in the afternoon.
I confess I like my birdsong clock. It reminds me of the antique notion that
time is circular, a notion I'd like to believe -- not because it's especially
believable, but because I still prefer it to the alternative.
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
