Monday 1 June 2009

Days

To say ‘I am fifteen thousand days old’ seems like a strange affectation—as if I am trying, Methuselah-like, to exaggerate my age. But it's nothing but the truth. (Indeed the truth is that I have lived for more than fifteen thousand days…)

Why should it seem such an enormous age? I suppose it touches on the cliché of parenthood, that the days are long but the years short: forty years is a heartbeat (in the larger scheme of things) but fifteen thousand days draws your imagination into the sticky specifics of so many individual slots of times: getting yourself out of bed fifteen thousand times; fifteen thousand afternoons as the sun through the window pushes a parellelogram of light slowly across the carpet; fifteen thousands sinking, blushing suns.

I might hope to live thirty thousand days, or even thirty-five, conceivably—just—as high as thirty-eight or nine. Thinking about it like that puts it in the realm of the stone age—many people die in their teens (of thousands of days); some lucky few make it into their late twenties or thirties. Nobody makes forty. Life fleets.

3 comments:

rog peppe said...

i like this, having reached exactly 14771 days myself (count courtesy of wolfram alpha), and feeling the time pile on, day by day, in ever smaller granules.

days like today though, sunny and slow, make me think that life is still eternal.

nnyhav said...

funny, you don't look a day over 14,000

Adam Roberts Project said...

How very kind of you to say so.