We are born

There is something unkind in the order of nature; but there it is: “since by man came death” we’ve had old age ever since as well. As for death, that inevitability seems to most not as awful as first when we are young it sounds--we understand it as it is: an inevitability, and we generally have long enough to live with the idea such that when it comes (if not brought on suddenly or painfully protractedly), we’re pretty well suited to the task (of dying that is). As for getting old, that's another story.

The story begins as Dickens would say when “[we are] born”. We are instantly attached, and it is a lesson that we will never forget. The lesson: that when we don’t have what we’re attached to we get pretty upset, be it Mommy, spouse, car or hairline. We creatures are not particularly keen on things being other than we like them, want them.

Indeed, for all of the Western Tradition’s talk of change (as Aristotle would say) being the “most evident thing in the universe”, we certainly don’t like what we see. But that’s just it: it takes a long time to notice it. And why not: if the mirror is our only romance (rather than other people), if older persons are only our parents or grandparents (and, bless them, heaven knows the psyche tries to distance ourselves from ever being ‘them’), and if our culture focuses almost solely on how young, beautiful and fast we all should be, then what chance do we have? No, it is not Death that comes “like a thief in the night” (we’re expecting him--and besides somewhere or other we heard--and when push comes to shove want to believe--that "God", "Jesus", or "Somebody Upthere" put an end at least to eternal-death), no it is not Death that is the unexpectedly returning Master (though that can be true enough), it isn’t even Old Age: it is Aging--the stealthily, creeping, passing of things as they are. This is why the Psalmist could say: “[our] days are as grass . . . the wind passeth over it, and it is gone”. Not because life is all that fleeting, but because we can so easily fail to desire to see things as they are: we like them the way they were or as their ever-imagined should, could or would be. Like the tombstone says, we live from date to date. Looking at said stone, I suppose one could wonder “what went on in between?”.

I should like to suggest (and I am certainly not the first) that the curse of our kind is not Death, nor is it Aging. It is, rather, the possession of a culture that in many quarters is never quite settled not to have things, people, places and ourselves the way we like them, the way we want them--like when we were born.