I’ve been thinking about Time and how a few weeks can make all the difference. When I last wrote to you, it was mid-July. Since then, I have gained time across nine time zones and lost it when I returned to my starting point. I lost track of time completely in the other-world that is Alaska. And while I was flying west at 575 miles each hour, a dear friend, who had many more decades to give, died in an accident in an instant. He had been spending time doing what he loved best: road cycling in Burgundy’s beautiful countryside. At my friend’s funeral, in an English village church that had left time behind in the fifteenth century, his childhood friend recited, unhurried and steady, Linda Ellis’ poem ‘Dash’. In front of us lay a quotation from Pericles’ Funeral Oration which said much the same thing as the poem, only 2,500 years ago:
It is not only the inscriptions on their graves that mark them out but in people’s hearts, their memory abides and grows.
The dash. Such a small, merely typological symbol. It’s possibly the most bone-headedly obscure paraphrase of the potential of human existence.