Читать книгу Time, Twilight, and Eternity - Thom Rock - Страница 11

I.

Begin with cosmic calculation.

A star not much different than billions of others, a blue planet spinning in its orbit, a thin blanket of oxygen swaddling that star-struck ball . . . and us. Between the star and the planet, between the star and us: approximately ninety-three million miles. It takes more than eight minutes for the star’s light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, to navigate the darkness between and alight upon our faces.

The planet spins, tilted on its axis just so, and there is evening, and there is day. First the night, then the light—every dawn, the light—and after the light: night.

Begin with a moon circling the planet that is circling the sun; begin with reflection, with gravity and grace, with tides that rise and fall and rise up.

(Again)

Begin with revolution: Twenty-four hours, a measure of time, a day.

Multiply by 365.242199, the time it takes for the blue planet to make one complete circuit around the star and we get a year—time past, time present, time future—begin here: with the distance and duration of stars, the transit and timelessness of light. How everything depends on the tilt, the spin, the orbit—the circling around, irrevocably bound to each other.

And on spinning through space so fast we don’t even know we are moving.

II.

Or begin with the end in which is our beginning, no “before” or “after” and yet we are born and we live and we die. Begin with the ancient light that reaches our eyes from our next nearest star which, being so many light-years away, will have left that sun more than four years ago—a star-beam reaching back in space more than twenty-five trillion miles.

Wherever we look we look backward in time: what was, what might have been. Time does not pass . . .

We do.

We know time only from the fleeting flight of things. Time doesn’t simply fall like sand through an hourglass, we sieve it like powdered sugar dusted over flaked memories. Every breath and every moment is an end and a beginning; every person an epigraph and epitaph and that—that is where we start.

And where we depart . . .

Begin with us turned around just so, always looking over our shoulders, eternally saying goodbye. We are put here a little while that we may learn to bear the light of love, the Romantics declared. But we love what vanishes; it is time’s ineluctable beams we cannot bear. The bygone days of days gone by, time gone by. Time irretrievable, irredeemable—time since, time without—time then and there . . .

And then again.

Begin with the brevity of—the urgency of—life. Begin with trajectory.

Begin with the fire of time in which we burn.

III.

Or begin with the sky on fire, begin with a word: sunset—another: gloaming. A bouquet of time arranged just so, a vase full of evening: sprays of starlight, night branches, a sprig of sunshine.

A single long-stemmed moment.

A perfect blue hour where we measure space with our hearts and love is that measure, where time is elastic and our passions expand it—time present, time immemorial.

Four o’Clocks ticking out their fragrance. Moonflowers and starflowers and morning glories clutching and clinging—their curling tendrils, their vining stems pulling them up to the light. A sunflower: its golden face chasing after the burning transit of a distant star in the sky. The blue gentian and forget-me-nots whispering pure words from the mountain-slopes of another time, another place.

Van Gogh arranging twilight in a sky blue vase:

Still / Life (the clutch, the cling)

Begin here, begin now. Begin always.