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Life as an Hourglass

Last week during his Prairie Home Companion broadcast Garrison Keillor introduced a rendition of the Beatles song "Something In The Way She Moves", attributing it to Paul McCartney and John Lennon. He was later reminded that George Harrison actually wrote the song. Now Keillor is nowhere near my age and he's already forgetting things. But that's the way it goes. Things that once immediately came to mind now have to be groped after with great mental effort and often left to reside in oblivion.

Aging! I mean the only names I recognize in the Press Democrat's daily list of celebrity birthdays are those over age sixty. The other names mean nothing at all to me nor are any of those young actors displayed at the Oscar awards recognizable. Indeed they all look two dimensional to me and not beset by any thought of one day populating a seniors residence. Even current events seem hardly current to people who have lived long enough to have seen one war or election or World Series or dictator or invention after another over a span of eighty years. The same old story (despite its cast of different players) gets boring after awhile - unless it's Shakespeare instead of the news of the day.

Prince Fabrizio in Giuseppe di Lampedusa's 1957 novel The Leopard had such feelings relative to his era. He was a product of feudal Sicily, patriarch of the House of Salina, which ruled benignly over peasant families in an undeveloped landscape for centuries. And then in 1860 came Garibaldi and his red shirts bringing Sicily all the benefits of "democracy" (based on a very limited male franchise) and a unified Italy. Now merchants descended from illiterate farmers began running things. Urban hyperactivity spread across the landscape leaving not a vacant lot undeveloped in a pursuit of "happiness" otherwise known as profit. Even the Prince's aristocratic but cash poor nephew had to marry a wealthy merchant's daughter whose grandfather never took a bath. Of course the daughter looked like Claudia Cardinale, so who's to complain! Changing times and their impact on an old man! And did the events of 1860 bring about a Golden Age in Italy? Not really. Political and regional strife remained as intense as before. The red shirts would no doubt be followed by shirts of a different color.

And so at 73 the Prince admitted to feeling as if a vital fluid, "even the will to go on living were ebbing out of him slowly but steadily, as grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried, unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hourglass. With the slightest effort he would notice the rustling of the grains of sand as they slid lightly away, the instants of time escape from his mind and leave him forever."

But is that the whole story? Does the aging process amount only to a loss of memory, a failing interest in things, a mental weariness corresponding to one's physical decline? Not if we have lived right. Not if we have maintained an interest in things beyond current events, beyond the media; an interest in things spiritual. Not if we have learned from experience to fathom what really matters in the course of human history, things such as the Bible and great literature dwell upon. No - for simultaneously with our physical decline it's possible for us to grow deeper, more courageous, wiser, yes even holier as we catch on to what life is really about: faith, proactive love, eternal values.

Prince Fabrizio began to sense this, for as he continued to contemplate his life as an hourglass he drew consolation from that thought that "those tiny grains of sand were not lost; they were vanishing, but accumulating elsewhere in some more lasting pile." Or perhaps what was happening was a more spiritual process as if "the tiny particles of water vapor exhaled from a narrow pond" were mounting into the sky to become one with "great clouds, light and free".

-- Geoff Wood