Summer/August

Counting Our Heartbeats

Another thought stirred by recent reading. Vladimir Nabokov in a moment of introspection writes that our cradles are suspended over an abyss. Our existence is a brief crack of light between two black eternities. We are not awed by the first one out of which we were born. Our labored preoccupation seems to be with the next one we are headed toward at the rate of 4,500 heartbeats an hour. I wonder at the force which propels us toward our extinction and how much the world wastes, with chronic disregard, our heartbeats. So much time taken up with the conflicting claims of personal purpose, greed, means and ends, apprehension and misapprehension, and ultimately with the race between knowledge and catastrophe. Voltaire quipped that we are all likely to leave this world in as sorry a state as when we first entered it. After seven decades of observation and no small amount of reading and thinking, I must grant the old French cynic his due. I see old problems becoming new problems, the new simply the old in different guise.

Judge Learned Hand once observed that no problem is ever solved, explaining that as soon as one thinks it is, the solution itself starts turning into another problem. Each day or week often appears to be a reprise of a previous day or week, with only the players, scenery and events changing their identities, aspects and shapes. Our ability to learn the art of living is severely limited. Although a sizable store of facts about our environment, both earthy and celestial, has been gleaned from the past, it appears that we are still at a loss to apply it effectively to the failings in our endeavors to better the human condition. "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers." It tarries too long, I fear.

I would rather cast my insignificant lot with twisting leaf and bending grass and all that dance to the rhythms of life. I count fortunate the days when the man made world does not reach in to thwart me or weary me with demands I do not wish to waste my heartbeats on. At slightly more than 60 beats a second, I have only, with any luck, little more than 200,000,000 to spend. How can I afford to be a spendthrift at such a rate at this late date?