Time and singularity

 The latest Vandy alumni magazine reports what I already knew, but seeing it in print makes it emphatic and real. My old mentor, and my old classmate, are both stepping down. 

 

I shared this in a text to several far-flung pals. One quoted his recently-late father's late lament: "I don't know what time is."

John Lachs, I learned in this notice, supervised 72 Ph.D dissertations in his decades of service to Vanderbilt. I'm proud  and humbled to have been one of them.

One of my early Nashville memories is a scene from my first summer here, the summer before the election of Ronald Reagan. Bandas and some others of our young cohort were gathered on a porch on Belcourt Avenue near campus, as he held forth and proclaimed the impending decline and fall of American civilization as we knew it. He projected a cynical, imposing edge. "Badass," we'd later call that attitude and mien. (Now, if you met him on the street, you might discern a different resemblance. Ned?) Someone else on that porch, if memory serves, said things weren't as bad as he said. Time will tell. Or has it already?

So what is time? I just know that it keeps on slipping slipping slipping... And flattening, and shrinking. In retrospect, if we're lucky, it will represent us in others' memory as a single clarifying note. William James in 1903 remembered his godfather Emerson that way: "...when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory [is] so slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us... happy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgement."

I hope my friends are happy. It certainly makes me happy to recall them, as they were and as they are. Happy retirement, gentlemen.