“No matter has occurred, no matter goes to occur,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “it’s the dwelling second that comprises the sum of the thrill, this second through which we contact life and all of the vitality of the previous and future.” A technology after her, Henry Miller positioned on the coronary heart of the art of living the truth that “on how one orients himself to the second relies upon the failure or fruitfulness of it.”
We all know this. We all know that we’re creatures of time, that the arrow of time pins us to our personal finitude, that point is change and alter is entropy and without entropy there would be no being. Nonetheless, the deepest a part of us — the half that yearns for permanence against all reason — can not settle for dwelling on this lending library for loss, can not however be unsettled by every birthday, every Monday, every flip of seasons.
And but interior peace — that crucible of happiness — is essentially a matter of the peace we make with the passage of time.
That’s what Pete Seeger knew when he tailored, almost verbatim, a passage from the Hebrew Bible — Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 — into the traditional 1959 tune “Flip! Flip! Flip! (To All the pieces There Is a Season).” And that’s what Nina Simone, who thought deeply about time, knew when she sang her soul into Seeger’s tune in what stays one of the breathtaking covers of all time:
To each factor there’s a season, and a time to each goal underneath the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to interrupt down, and a time to construct up;
A time to weep, and a time to snicker; a time to mourn, and a time to bounce;
A time to forged away stones, and a time to collect stones collectively;
A time to embrace, and a time to chorus from embracing;
A time to realize that which is to get, and a time to lose; a time to maintain, and a time to forged away;
A time to rend, and a time to stitch; a time to maintain silence, and a time to talk;
A time of affection, and a time of hate; a time of battle, and a time of peace.
Complement with Ursula Ok. Le Guin’s “Hymn to Time” and Kahlil Gibran on befriending time, then revisit 200 years of nice writers reckoning with the mystery of it all.
