Conquering Time

"Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered."

         

                                           T.S. Eliot "Burnt Norton"

Only through time time is conquered.   God, I love that.   That Eliot guy, he could scribble a line or two, huh?   But while he meant something different from what I am taking from the poem, I hope he'd understand.   Approve?   That's asking a bit much.

Eliot wrote here of the blessing and grace of experience, of the Platonic outside-timeness of god, and probably a ton of other things I am wholly unequipped to rattle on about.  Probably "Burnt Norton", like most great poems, is about several things simultaneously, working on some quantum model where all things exist at once.   That's what all the best literature does, what every writer worth a pile of commas strives for.   And most of us, 99.9% of us, never even sniff that marvelous, ambiguous all-ness.   It's a strange and futile pursuit, this writing business.  A monstrous ego required to even attempt it, a sure humbling awaiting those who do.

But I digress.  (No, really, Craig?)  What I come away with from Eliot today, lately, is a heightened appreciation of time.  Mainly because I haven't any.  Well, that's not entirely true.   But I do have to fight for it more, carve it out, steal it.   Of all the aspects of returning to school as an older fart that I'd underestimated, I think this was the one I'd undervalued most.

Gone is the time for just farting around.   Gone is the time to snatch the Playstation away from the daughter to blow an hour or so playing Madden.   Gone is the leisure to get lost on a Wiki-crawl.  (You know, you start reading one entry in Wikipedia, click on a link, click on another, and an hour later you realize that, while you began reading about the Beatles' WHITE ALBUM you've somehow wound up on an article about the Boxer Rebellion.)  But most of all, gone is the time to read for pleasure.

Of all of these, only the last really stings.  This has happened to me once before.  A few years back, in 2006, I was diagnosed with a charming little disease called keratoconus.  What this is, it's a thinning of the corneas, which, owing to fluid pressure in the eye, allows them to bulge outward.  Think of a bubble on the side of a thinning tire.  This causes no end of vision problems due to refraction of light into the eye and loss of lens acuity, and less than a century ago would have ended in total blindness.  Strictly speaking, keratoconus is ideopathic, meaning no one knows what causes it.  Some, like my doc, think that it's not helped by things like gas permeable contact lenses, which I was urged into as a youth because I was a heavy reader.   This is what we mean by irony, folks:  contact lenses meant to help me read may have ultimately contributed quite heavily to my loss of the ability to do so.   The gas permeable lenses scored and carved my corneas as they bulged out, and did so in such a fashion that by the time I felt any pain, the game was already over.   One unfortunate side effect of keratoconus is that sufferers of it normally have an extremely high pain threshold where their eyes are concerned.

Anyway, glasses wouldn't work at all for me, nor would any of the dozen or so contact lenses we tried.   By mid 2007, I was having difficulty wearing any lenses at all due to the pain and the torturous light sensitivity.  This meant I muddled through work and took the damn things out the instant I could.   Which in turn mean no extraneous reading for me.  I'd have the occasional good day, wherein I'd greedily gulp down one of the thousand books I'd been meaning to get to, but those became rarer and rarer, and by 2008, a corneal transplant was necessary on my left eye.  (As I told my wife, "I see with dead people."  Yes, I am weird.  Thought we'd established that.) ((Okay, I'm weirder than that.  At breakfast one week before the operation, I told my wife, "You know, whomever I'm getting my cornea from is probably just having a cup of coffee like us."   She thought I was being macabre, but the truth is the thought was seriously, spiritually humbling.))

Long recovery, eighteen months, but my ability to read increased, which means that I gradually got back the joy of reading for my own pleasure.  My gratitude at this cannot be overstated.

So why the hell give it up again?

"Only through time time is conquered."

I'm sacrificing a couple of years now in the hopes of buying more time down the road.   With some, but not much, luck, the degree I'm earning now will allow me to step away from the workforce earlier by allowing me to earn more sooner.   The equation is simple.  I have a wife who has said, basically, once we have a set figure in hard savings, then I'm free to walk away from the 8 to 5 world.   Now, it's a big figure, but not unobtainable (nor even unobtanium; screw you, AVATAR.)  Plus, I'll get to sneak some lit courses in as electives, so it ain't a total wash.   But yeah, selling time now to buy more later.  Conquering time through time.  Surely not what Eliot had in mind, but I'll take it.

Of course, if I get up really really early Sunday, I might could read some of the new Stephen King . . .