ON TIME

ON TIME

For centuries, writers and readers have claimed that writing and those special forms of writing named "literature" have power.  Writers exploit languages and the art of writing.  Readers decode variously arranged words; they succeed or fail to make sense of the arrangements.  Readers who believe words have gravity and authority often become writers.  They also  often become critics, warning other writers and readers and themselves about gains and losses in the uses of languages, about the impact of words  on everyday life.

The recurring  quests for sense and meaning seem to be normal, and it is normal too that these cycles enable us to construct knowledge.  Knowledge and the desire for truth which knowledge sponsors have fleeting existence in time, and our being aware that such is the case in the 21st century fills many of us with pessimism and dread and wild speculations that time is conspiring with chaos to torment us.  There is nothing amazingly new, of course,  in this recognition.  We are simply repeating ancestral postures. Ah, humanity.  Ah, William Blake's invisible worms consuming the spirits which live in the roses. Is this one outcome of creating words and signs?

The events and reports on them that most of us have to deal with  2019 portend an ending. Note carefully, however, the  divergent  endings or terminal points we so anxiously imagine.  It is  difficult to believe the evidence of one's senses as we descend from pure reason into swamps of fantasy and desperately struggle to possess sanity yet once again. 

Although common sense suggests it is premature to reach conclusions, something rather unspeakable in our nature pulls us to one conclusion or another.  This existential damnation or impossibility of not making choices (or having choices made for us against our wills) is painful. We dwell more on the immaterial  pains of emotion than on the physical pain our bodies record.

We say to ourselves "Pain doesn't last always" and move on with our lives, writing and reading and speaking ( if orality is our primary choice) ourselves into a history. So on time about time are we that we embalm ourselves with excruciatingly beautiful lies. An excellent essay on the American way of lying ourselves to death in our new century is Drew Gilpin Faust's "Carry Me Back: Race, History, and Memories of a Virginia Childhood" ( The Atlantic, August 2019, pp. 52-61 ), because Faust's treatment of  white on white hypocrisy is exceptionally on time.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            July 28, 2019