I have had the pleasure of being introduced to a very fine writer, in my opinion. I haven’t met him in person, but I have enjoyed the characters and insights in his novels. His name? Wendell Berry. I came across the quote below in his novel Andy Catlett. Andy is an old man, writing about his adventures as a 9-year-old boy. Ponder, and enjoy.
“Time is told by death, who doubts it? But time is always halved – for all we know, it is halved – be the eye blink, the synapse, the immeasurable moment of the present. Time is only the past and maybe the future; the present moment, dividing and connecting them, is eternal. The time of the past is there, somewhat, but only somewhat, to be remembered and examined. We believe that the future is there too, for it keeps arriving, though we know nothing about it. But try to stop the present for your patient scrutiny, or to measure its length with your most advanced chronometer. It exists, so far as I can tell, only as a leak in time, through which, if we were quiet enough, eternity falls upon us and makes its claim. And here I am, an old man, traveling as a child among the dead.
“We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births. For time is told also by life. As some depart, others come. The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome. I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren. Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming. And time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love, which is always present. Time, then, is told by love’s losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for the loved received and given, however much.”
– Andy Catlett, in Andy Catlett by Wendell Berry