[Image found at What My World’s Like]
From whiskey river:
Visiting the Graveyard
When I think of death
it is a bright enough city,
and every year more faces there
are familiarbut not a single one
notices me,
though I long for it,
and when they talk together,which they do
very quietly,
it’s in an unknowable language —
I can catch the tonebut understand not a single word —
and when I open my eyes
there’s the mysterious field, the beautiful trees.
There are the stones.
(Mary Oliver, from Red bird [source])
…and:
…Time is a measure of energy, a measure of motion.
We have agreed internationally on the speed of the clock. And I want you to think about clocks and watches for a moment. We are of course slaves to them. And you will notice that your watch is a circle, and that it is calibrated, and that each minute, or second, is marked by a hairline which is made as narrow as possible, as yet to be consistent with being visible. And when we think of a moment of time, when we think what we mean by the word now, we think of the shortest possible instant that is here and gone, because that corresponds with the hairline calibrations on the watch.
As a result, we are a people who feel that we don’t have any present, because we believe that the present is always instantly vanishing. This is the problem of Goethe’s Faust. He attains his great moment and says to it, “Oh still delay, thou art so fair.” But the moment never stays. It is always disappearing into the past.
Therefore we have the sensation that our lives are constantly flowing away from us. And so we have a sense of urgency. Time is not to waste; time is money. And so, because of the tyranny of clocks, we feel that we have a past, and that we know who we were in the past — nobody can ever tell you who they are, they can only tell you who they were — and we believe we also have a future. And that belief is terribly important, because we have a naive hope that the future is somehow going to supply us with everything we’re looking for.
You see, if you live in a present that is so short that it is not really here at all, you will always feel vaguely frustrated.
(Alan Watts [source, in slightly different form])