To Be Older than Dirt

My father--the father of seven of us--was born 107 years ago, today: December 3, 1905. in Norway.

It has always helped me to remember that the Bergen waterfront burned down the same year. I do not know that there is a connection.

There is a small psychological . . . not a jolt, but at least a twitch . . . in being able to say that one's parent was born at least a hundred years ago, or that both of them were.
It is a little twitch reminding us of our own, logically necessary, mortality. It is like saying that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born in 1809. It does not have the same profundity of saying that the earth is 6,000 years old, but it is more believable.

To say that the earth is 6,000 years old il like saying that my father was born a little over a day ago. But we are not discussing religious absurdities here: this is no Sunday pulpit, this is the real world.

In the real world, one of the hardest things we have had to learn is that the time-scale of our lives is absurdly short compared to the age of earth, or of the universe, just as the speed at which we move makes it extremely difficult to comprehend what the speed of light is, for instance. Or that our everyday experience of space is so tiny that the immensity of these stellar spaces almost baffles us.

I remember something from nearly every year of the life I have had, and while that is obviously not even 107 years long, it is long enough that I have some sense of what a hundred years is. I have almost no ordinary sense of what a space is that is so large, and so old, that it would take light, traveling at 186 thousand miles per second, 14 billion years to cross it.

But I know it is true.

The astonishment is that we, slow, small, nearly inert critters here under a canopy of space and time, have figured all of this out, at least provisionally.

It is amazing what matter and energy have done, and can do, but we are it; part of it.

Comments

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