December 29
The long habit of living makes dying hard for us. Yet the urns teach modesty: names engraved in bronze sink at last into time all the same.
Hydriotaphia — Urn Burial (freely rendered)
Listening mode
The long habit of living makes dying hard for us. Yet the urns teach modesty: names engraved in bronze sink at last into time all the same.
In an old calendar you find an entry in your own handwriting: a time, a first name, an exclamation mark. Back then this appointment evidently mattered to you. Today you know neither who was meant nor what it was about.
Most of your days have vanished in this way, and you don't miss them. Still, you came out of them. The forgetting that perhaps unsettles you when you think about later has, then, long been happening on a small scale, and you are the one doing it.
Even so, this can't fully reassure you. With the calendar, you are the one who forgets, and you remain the one who notices the gap. You have been used to this position for so long that you can hardly imagine it away. Even when you picture a time when no one knows your name any more, you are still standing somewhere at the edge of that picture, watching. What is hard, then, may be less being forgotten. Harder is that no one is left to notice it, not even you.
You turn the pages. Two weeks later the same first name appears again, this time without an exclamation mark.
