Revisiting A Post 14 Years Later: I Am Changed, I Am the Same — I Will Be Food for Worms

I had occasion lately to come across a posting of mine from January 15, 2007. It is titled, “The Past Is Not Done With Me.” That would make the essay over fourteen years old. I was 39-years old when I penned it, and now I am 53-years old.

What is the difference between those two ages? 39 and 53?

The difference is HUGE.

Let me explain.

During my early twenties I was fixated on the drama of early adulthood: developing my adult persona, finishing my education, and finding my place in the world — courtship drama with the opposite sex, and all the joy as well as frustration of that stage of life. Too much testosterone — ambition and angst. Excitement and possibility. Anxiety and despair. Everything was so intense! I wrote the following in that essay about pop music but I was really talking about the emotional experience of youth:

“it is a matter of youth, experience, and memory — and so a good deal of mediocre, some awful, and bit of excellent music will forever be wedded to his first kiss, her first heartbreak, and the loss of their virginity that Friday night when the parents were out of town. Pop music is the soundtrack to the narrative of our brutal, wide-eyed, and reckless youth. For all of us the extreme highs and extraordinary lows which make up the hormone roller coaster of youth will forever be associated with this popular tune or that love ballad of the age, no less indelibly than Pavlov’s slobbering dogs were conditioned by the ringing of the dinner bell. It will be hardwired into our brains and will not leave us.”

The power of youth and love: it was hardwired into my brain from the music of the era. This is what happened to me in 1987, and I could still feel it in 2007, as that essay shows.

But by March 2021, when I read that essay last week, it was different.

This is how I feel now: I no longer much care how I felt in 1987 when I was 20 years old. In fact, I can hardly remember how I felt when I was 20. It was a long time ago. I was almost a different person than I am now. Almost. That is the difference for me between being 39 and 53.

Nowadays at 53-years of age, I am focused much more on maximizing the rest of my sixth decade, and the two or decades after that I have left. The idea that my life is limited is more concrete: I have maybe thirty more years left, maybe. Death is not an abstraction which others suffer, but won’t ever affect me. Since 1987 I have seen plenty of death up close and know it’s a reality which awaits me, too. So I would prefer to do the best I can with what I have left. I will leave the irremediable past in the past. 

That is how I feel now.

Or maybe this is the finer point: I still care about how I felt in 1987, just not nearly so much. 

No matter how strong a lover might feel about his first love, no matter how much one might nurse an injustice or regret a debacle — the passage of time wears it all away. The past fades away; time conquers all. It erases us, slowly but surely. As the popular ballad laments, “All we are is dust in the wind.”

Ourselves, our feelings — all we hold precious — it will not last the test of time. Time will plow us and everything we esteem into the earth. Shakespeare reminds us we are food for worms. So true. Our future is excremetious.

I posted “The Past Is Not Done With Me” 14-years ago when I was 39. Moving the opposite direction into the future 14 years I will be 67-years old.

Wow.

I hope I’m still alive.

The odds are that I will. But nothing is guaranteed.

My perspective surely will be much changed again by that time. Will I look back when I’m 67 and wonder where the last 14 years have gone? When I read this essay in 2035, for sure I will be different than I am now.

My body will be different. My brain will be older, and my joints will be more worn out. I will have skin cancer, for sure, and God knows what else. I will keep my fingers crossed. Time promises us nothing. If time brought Ozymandias low, surely it will do the same to me.

Time, time, time.

It never stands still.

I, like the rest of us, have been challenged by change during this pandemic. The passage of time always brings change. We negotiate change well. Or we don’t.

It is easier to see how I am changed over time. Heraclitus and the ever changing river — never the same again, when one steps into it.

But how am I the same? Parmenides and the never changing universe — always the same, no matter how it looks.

I am the same, but I am much changed. Both are true. 

It is evident in my personal webpage.

So is the person who wrote my Frequently Asked Questions the same person who writes this essay?

Yes, and no. 

I have not read a word of my FAQ in over twenty years. But I remember writing it during several months in the late 1990s. I remember enjoying it. So the answer is “yes” and “no.” 

I am the same, and not the same. Heraclitus and Parmenides.

The same will be true in 2035. 14 years from now.

It will be here sooner than you think, my dear reader!

My father recently told me that life is like a roll of toilet paper in that the closer it gets to the end, the faster it runs out. Each successive year seems to speed by faster than the previous. That W.H. Auden quote “The years shall run like rabbits” runs through my head in his dour British accent when my thoughts turn in this direction. 

Auden the poet, he died in September of 1973 when I was six years old. And now I’m 53. Auden wrote that poem in 1938, one year before my father was born. He is now 81-years old. In 14 years my father will be 95. 

I thought it was a moment when the 20th anniversary of my mother’s death took place in 2016. But soon I will be the same age she was when she died: 56.

I can hardly believe it. But it’s true.

Time, time, time.

1975, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, 2025, 2035 — the inexorable march of the years. 

In the larger picture it is nothing. A drop in the bucket. A single human lifetime.

But they add up to the vital years of my life. When they are gone, I will be gone.

Do it now everyone. Live your life while you can. Don’t wait.

The past is gone. Today is everything. Tomorrow is a lie.

‘O let not Time deceive you,
   You cannot conquer Time.”

And fourteen more years will speed by.

Time will have its way.

---

“AS I WALKED ONE EVENING”
W.H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
  Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
  Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
  I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
  ‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
  Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
  And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
  Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
  Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
  For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
  And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city
  Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
  You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
  Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
  And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry
  Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
  To-morrow or to-day.

‘Into many a green valley
  Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
  And the diver’s brilliant bow.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
  Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
  And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
  The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
  A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
  And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
  And Jill goes down on her back.

‘O look, look in the mirror,
  O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
  Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
  As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
  With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
  The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
  And the deep river ran on.