Devouring Time

Blunt thou the lion's paws

The American poet and novelist Jim Harrison (Legends of the Fall, True North) once said of turning older: "I used to explain to students…the difference between poetry and you is that when you gaze into the mirror, you say, “I am getting old,” but Shakespeare, upon looking into the mirror, responds, “Devouring Time, blunt thou thy lion’s paws.” 

I've read both Harrison and Shakespeare but this is the first I've come across either of these quotes, which have arrived appropriately in time, as it were, as I celebrated my 60th birthday this month—with this awesome occasion—and so my thoughts have been hitched to the prospects and wonder of what may cometh (sorry) in my seventh decade of life. 

The narrator of Shakespeare's sonnet (number 19 for those interested in reading it in full) speaks directly to Time and the all-consuming force that ravages everything in its path. The narrator pleas then with it that it spare her lover from old age. By the end (spoiler alert) she accepts that there is nothing she can do about it and turns herself, and her love, over to the only true immortality, that found in the written word: "Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young."

I'm gonna draw the line at "do they worst", but certainly there are questions and concerns as we grow older, with the appearance of wrinkles and diminishing beauty, in regards to our ongoing (and ensuing) decline. I find myself drawn to comparison. To my father at this age. To my brother, to friends and other men and women I've known who've passed this mark in their own lives. I wonder what did they feel when they looked themselves in the mirror? Did they like what they saw? Did they see only their old self or did their reflection show them a future self they still had time to create?

"Come on now, we’re going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

It's heavy stuff, I know. Turning 60 is pretty heavy for many reasons and worth a moment or two to reflect on the merciless progress of year after year. To imagine ourselves—and loved ones, too—as able to somehow sidestep it all, stay young, beautiful, vibrant—To say: Ah ha! Missed me, Time, you motherfucker. 

Sixty is the new fifty, we tell ourselves so that we feel better about being one decade closer to death. As if the prior ten years were something one might wish to reclaim, to hold and keep, a treasure trove of sweets: 

And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;

But sixty is just sixty, only that. Which brings me back to Harrison’s comment: Looking in the mirror, and saying, “I am getting old” as opposed to saying "Have your way, Time. Do your thing." Only one of the two serves us well. Only one abandons the false impression that time is a thing we can alter or affect, change about. 

Think of the steps you, yourself, have taken to remain the someone you were in the past. Be it through work, through earning money, through exercise, through the way we dress, the stories we tell ourselves and of ourselves, the people with which we associate, the impression we yearn to leave with them. And still. Time passes with or without consent, doing what it does, the very worst even, despite our contrarian objection.

My father was around my age now when he first met Franca thirty some years ago. She has never known his younger self, and I, too, cannot easily remember that version of him. Some of that was because for a long time he did not take care of his health. He drank too much, moved too little, and by the time he'd turned sixty had suffered a couple of heart attacks and open heart surgery. He was certainly no fan of Time's passing and lived with much confidence (and success, at that) in the notion that medicine would save him. 

I cannot imagine him looking in the mirror and being shocked, or even flummoxed, by what he saw. He did not question how or perhaps wonder even what he might've done differently to influence the status quo or eventual outcome (hint: it's the same for every one of us). It wasn't poetry, far from it. I imagine his thoughts were more akin to: I see you there, Time. I know what's coming. For now though, how about you go and fuck off. 

Not exactly a sentiment worthy of immortality, but for him it was truth, and the best he could do.

In my case, I believe that my sixties will be nothing like my fifties, which were nothing like my forties and so on and so forth. I recognize Time for the thief that it is and try not to pretend otherwise, adding what I can to whatever pleasures in life I discover, or those that find me (looking at you German spa experience).

Maybe gazing then at the reflection in my own mirror my thoughts will fall somewhere between that of my father’s dismissal and the sonnet woman's acceptance to let Time eat whatever and all that it may. Maybe I'll just smile at it and it will smile back and neither of us will say nothing.

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