As similes go, I think “time is a river” is done.
Iraq suggests to me that time, as here humans may conceive of it, may resemble something more like a table riven with canyons.
Some come to the edge of the end of something: if they turn back, they go backward while time continues advancing others around them; if they look toward the edge out ahead of themselves, they have to devise a crossing – and then take it.
Sometimes, I refer to Hillel the Elder (circa 35 BCE to 10 CE) who said in the course of arguing the meaning of Judaism with his rival Shammai, “whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”
🙂
Hillel has been reputed to have said a few other good things as well (I believe three epigram have been listed to the left of this post), but that just quoted is the one that suggests a story about how we got to this edge.
If the Next Poetry looks difficult for writing (someone, please, channel Rumi), the separation of a kind of personality from the encouragement of a more human and natural ethics may want for sophistication greater than immediately available.
Simply pointing the finger at the despotic and spitting out the words “malignant narcissist!” might not do the trick.
Suggesting that the world is full of “bad daddies” might be more helpful: at least it would focus on the nature of some men and that of most men and women in light of the appearance of relationships between dictators, control of others (starting with what others hear and what they say), the exertion of power over others (whether they like it or not), and, always, the exploitation of the same for “narcissistic supply” accompanied by spectacles of murder and plunder undertaken with the greatest cruelty imaginable and achievable.
Now I / you / we can see them: The Despotic.
The Democratic stand opposed, but, alas, not quite put together themselves. In Iraq, in fact, it appears they may be getting mauled, and the story in Syria tells exactly what happens to undefended good deed doers.
Time spreads out always to the end of things with a moment of division before the beginnings of new things. That “now” may be short — somebody made a decision! — or it may be very long and tortuous as with forty years in a wilderness.
For some, perhaps myself included, time is also an island.
Every day is yesterday but a little different, but then — at my age — not too much so.
I have read that there are no longer “uncontacted people” — isolated tribes entirely untouched by the world beyond themselves — on our small planet, but some who may flee from further contact, probably with good practical reasons in mind, may live similarly.
The rest of us have to deal with one another in some way, and the “some way” we do that brings with it change — and better change we want than that assumed by a handful of tyrannical others.
Interesting Reference
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