How Time Flies

I usually write the title to a post in my blog before writing the body of the post only to change the title when the post takes on a life of its own and digresses from the title and this post is no exception except that after typing the title and before even beginning my writing, I thought surely there must be a better title than something so commonplace and unexciting as "How Time Flies".  I thought something more intellectual would be better.  A 17th century poem came to mind but I immediately dismissed it as pretentious and inappropriate for a blog that I take pride in for my bold penning of whatever catches my fancy without the slightest fear and without having to bother about political correctness.

But I should say something about that 17th century poem. Contrary to what many people today think, poetry is not staid, boring, tedious lines on a page.   In that poem, the poet, mark this!, desiring to have sex with his girlfriend, cautions her that time is short and they should have sex before they die of old age.  He even makes shocking allusions to various parts of her body!  But the thrust of his poem is how swiftly time flies and we must act speedily, in his case, have sex with his girlfriend.   And that's only a poem written in the early 17th century and even then, it's full of sex and is worthy of a triple-X rating.

In the 19th century, Tennyson who was mourning his best friend's untimely death, wrote about how fleeting life was.  He looked at the cliffs that had fossils of ancient animals and bemoaned the extinction of whole species in the cold hands of nature and time.  In a trice, countless species become extinct so what's the mere death of an individual?

A year and 11 months ago, exactly to the day, my best friend died after a long struggle with cancer.  He was the same guy I spoke about in my post more than two years ago.  Click here.  As I explained in that entry, I told a small lie in order to make Christianity more acceptable to a few friends.  Years later, he asked me again, months before his death what I really thought of heaven and the after-death.  I told him another lie.  I said there was nothing more certain in my mind than the existence of heaven.

How time flies!  Two days before last Christmas, I blogged about a fairy-tale village I went to after travelling dangerously on a public bus through narrow lanes up and down mountains.  It was a village that was only accessible by a very long footbridge that hung precipitously over a huge ravine below.  Click here for the article and pics.  What I didn't talk about in my blog was what I saw in the village but of course I only went to the village after having taken a million photos of the bridge and the incredible scenery, I'm, after all, what uncouth youths today would call a camwhore.

You see, the village stands on top of a tall hill.  Over the centuries, the passage of time has taken its toll on the hill and the fringes have slowly eroded.  Houses have fallen off the cliff and the time will come when that beautiful village will be a thing of the past.

Here is a photo of me standing in front of what appears like the front door a large mansion.  You can see the steps leading to the front door.  But if you could open the door and step into the house, you would plunge down the edge of the cliff.  Only one wall of the mansion stands today.  The rest of the house fell plummeting into the abyss below a few centuries ago.  The owner of the mansion must been an important man in the village with a huge fortune.  It just took one fateful night when the earth seemed to rumble and before you knew it, this important man escaped death by the skin of his teeth but all his earthly goods vanished hundreds of feet below.

How time flies!