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Blupete's Weekly Commentary


October 17th, 1999.

"Time."

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
To-morrow will be dying.
Herrick: "To The Virgins."

Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last!
Loitering slow, the FUTURE creepeth --
Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth --
And motionless forever stands the Past.
Schiller: Sentences of Confucius.

Time: "A limited stretch or space of continued existence, as the interval between two successive events or acts, or the period through which an action, condition, or state continues ..." (OED.) Finding time to do the increasing number of things one would like to do, especially as one grows older, becomes a person's most important task; to the point where people will likely mistake you as being an unsociable cuss. Tyndall, in writing about the time that he had dinner with Faraday, said: "At two o'clock he came down for me. 'I never give dinners,' he said. 'I don't know how to give dinners, and I never dine out. But I should not like my friends to attribute this to a wrong cause. I act thus for the sake of securing time for work...' We dined on roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and potatoes; drank sherry, talked of research and its requirements, and of his habit of keeping himself from the distractions of society."

The difficulty, is this: time is a moment on a string of moments; and, it comes, in succession, but one moment at a time. Thus, we are unable to experience our existence but one moment at a time. We cannot organize our moments, group them up, or access them in any random fashion. We are locked into a piece of time; it ticks off for us all (regardless of our individual perception of it) at the same rate (its the reason a group of individuals can each make an arrangement to meet together at some point in the future). We, each of us, are locked into a piece of the time string; we have no choice but to take the next bead that comes to our figures; and, we ought to treat it with considerable reverence; for, some day, dear reader, you, like every mortal being, will run out of beads. One must make good use of their time, there is so little of it. Prepare yourself for the beads of time ahead. It is necessary to educate oneself so to better understand and therefore to enjoy the moments we each expect lie ahead. Everyday must be started out with a chapter or two of a good book, -- a factual book, not one of fiction. "Pass no day without a line, visit no place without a book."

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Peter Landry

October, 1999 (2019)