Sunday Pages: "A Shropshire Lad II: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now"

A poem by A.E. Housman

Dear Reader,

Today is Easter Sunday, the liturgical beginning of spring, and the day when wayward Catholics who have avoided church services all year attend Mass. This was the subject of some annoyance when I was a kid, as it was harder to park and find a seat, and we often wound up at the overflow Mass, in the gymnasium of the Catholic school next door, much to my mother’s vexation.

These days, I read the Resurrection as a simple metaphor. It is a story of rebirth and renewal and the promise that after three months of winter—the three days when Jesus lay dead, even though noon on Friday to noon on Sunday is only two days—spring will come again: grass will grow, flowers will bloom, leaves will emerge, and mosquitoes will appear out of nowhere to spoil the vernal beauty.

I have been thinking a lot lately about time: the passage of time, the measurement of time, the eternality of time and, for us mortal humans, its finiteness. On Friday, I was visiting colleges with my son, four hours away in the west of the state. In Fathermucker, my novel about a stay-at-home dad, I wrote that kindergarten was so far in the future that it felt like science fiction. Where did the time go? Everyone told us that it goes by quickly, and while its passage did not always feel so swift, here we are, mere months away from an empty nest.

To pass the time in the car, we listened to a serial podcast called S-Town. I’d heard it before, shortly after it was released in 2017, but my son had not, and I was in the mood to listen to it again. The seven-episode serial is about a clock restorer from rural Alabama, an eccentric genius. Clocks, of course, are devices that measure time—that mark the fleeing moments until ours runs out.

This clock restorer genius, John B. McLemore, who is something of a curmudgeon, shares some of his writing with the podcast producer. In a piece called “A Worthwhile Life Defined,” he runs some calculations and determines how much time—what he calls “worthy life” or “beneficial life”—we have to spend pursuing those things we wish to pursue, that really enrich us:

When one considers that the Undistinguished Life of an Industrialized Man in an Industrialized nation consists of about 25,000 Days, and that about 33 to 38 percent of those days are spent in slumber (perhaps 36%), then about 9,000 of those days are spent in Unconsciousness, or Dream State. That gives the Industrialized Man about 16,000 waking Days of Life.

He then deducts a significant portion of those 16,000 waking days for school, work, family obligations, jury duty, and so on, and determines that most of us have just 4,500 waking-hour days of beneficial life. We must cherish these days and put them to good use—or, as McLemore puts it, “take cognizance of the number of waking days [we have] remaining, and use them prudently.”

Not that long ago, clocks were expensive and therefore rare. The church clock would chime, and that was the only way most people knew the hour. While there were some early prototypes, wristwatches have only been around since 1868, when the Swiss clockmaker Patek Phillipe made one for Countess Koscowicz of Hungary, and have only been available to normal people since the Great War, when they were issued to all British soldiers to help coordinate troop movements.

Nowadays, it is impossible not to be aware of the time. There is a clock on our phones, our cable boxes, our kitchen appliances, the displays in our cars, and so on. Does this constant awareness of the hour help or hurt our ability to live in the moment—to live more beneficially?

Time is nothing more than a measure of the rotation of the earth on its axis, and the revolution of the earth around the sun, overlaid with the phases of the moon—respectively, the day, the year, and the month, which should really be spelled moonth. What difference will knowing the precise hour make next Monday (Moonday), when the moon passes directly in front of the sun, and day becomes night?

For his part, McLemore felt that communion with nature was the most enjoyable use of his limited time. As he wrote in a different piece,

the best times of my life, I realize, were the times I spent in the forest and field. I have walked in solitude beside my own babbling creek, and wondered at the undulations, meanderings, and tiny atolls that were occasionally swept into its midst. I have spent time in idle palaver with violets, lyre leaf sage, heliopsis, and monkshood. And marveled at the mystery of monotropa uniflora. I have audited the discourse of the hickories, oaks, and pines, even when no wind was present. I have peregrinated the woods in winter, under the watchful guard of vigilant dogs, and spent hours entranced by the exquisiteness and delicacy of tiny mosses and molds: entire forests within a few square inches. I have also run thrashing and flailing from yellowjackets. Before I could commence this discourse, I spent a few hours out under the night sky reacquainting myself with the constellations, like old friends.

And so on this Easter Sunday, a day of rebirth and renewal, I leave you with this lovely poem by A.E. Housman, the second entry in A Shropshire Lad, which was published in 1896—when the poet was 37 years old and did not yet own a wristwatch. The narrator here is only 20, as the middle stanza makes clear:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

The ravages of climate change—a subject that consumed the attention of John B. McLemore—have already begun to affect the seasons, the flora and fauna, the tides and wind patterns. One day, perhaps, the ice caps will melt, and the oceans will rise, and the Gulf Stream will veer off course, and most of the creatures on this planet will go extinct. Maybe we are approaching the end of humanity’s metaphorical 4,500 beneficial waking-life days. As is said of aging athletes: Father Time is undefeated.

Ah, but Mother Nature is all-powerful, and even when all of us are dead and gone, there will be seasons, there will be eclipses, there will be vernal equinoxes, and nothing we mortal humans can do now will change any of that.

For today, it is enough to know that spring has sprung, the sun is shining, the birds are tweeting, and we have entered the season of hope and promise and new beginnings. There are no days more beneficial than these.

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Photo credit: Maria Orlova via Pexels.