The passage of time is something we do not think about often. Some people are prone to getting nostalgic and reflecting on the past or, perhaps, they store up all their memories and live in the past. On the other hand, some may be future oriented and constantly work, plan, and strive towards goals yet distant. The struggle is to be able to harness the power of the present moment, and enjoy the thing that we call life or existence. Or as our Stoical friend Seneca exhorts us, “The greatest obstacle to living is expectation, which depends on tomorrow and wastes today…all that is still to come lies in doubt: live here and now! (On the Shortness of Life, 9). Or in other words, tomorrow is not guaranteed, so stop thinking about tomorrow and live today. Put, again, another way, “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matt 6:34). And yet, it is this anxiety of life that opens the individual up to “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility,” as Kierkegaard coined it, which induces a dizziness of freedom (The Concept of Dread).

The Evanescence of Youth

A quick survey of the 20^th century reveals each era had its fair share of cultural heartthrobs. Carey Grant, for example, of the Old Hollywood film era. Who can forget James Dean’s leather jacket and bad boy persona immortalized in Rebel Without a Cause? Or Elvis Presley with his crooning voice and then promiscuous dance moves. Paul Newman and Marlon Brando also come to mind. And still, Time has us all in her clutches, we are, for lack of better words, her slaves, bound ineluctably to decay, degeneration, and death. Indeed, death will claim us all. Whether we die at the age of 24 in a badass car accident, or die old, fat, alone, and of a constipation heart attack (for the “King” in life perhaps became a Joker in death. Or, dare I say…death by defecation?) makes no difference. As Marcus Aurelius reminds us, “All that you see will soon perish; those who witness this perishing will soon perish themselves. Die in extreme old age or die before your time—it will all be the same” (Meditations, 9.33). Even the young heartthrob Timothée Chalamet will be twenty-nine this year, putting him one year away from that all-too-dreaded age of thirty.

The heady days of the 1960s were hallmarked by anti-war, free love, and anti-establishment sentiments, rounded off with sex, drugs, and psychedelic rock and roll. This perhaps is no more encapsulated in a saying than that of Jack Weinberg and the Free Speech movement that grew out of UC Berkley in 1964: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” The myopia of this phrase was ironically realized just seven years later when Weinberg turned 31 in 1971. This phrase, sentiment, and myopia has persisted each generation in different iterations. For example, the “OK, Boomer” which attempts to shut down a conversation simply because of one’s age of the baby boomer generation. Of course, millennials and generation Z will also grow old and, indubitably, will also die. The idea that one should put any sort of stake in youth or physical appearance seems fatuous to me. For as soon as you have the ever-elusive potion of beauty and youth, it will be stripped away from you no sooner than you clutched it in your palm. The truth is that youth is fleeting, subjected to time, and is a meaningless vapor, no matter how much money you have or how good your plastic surgery is. Seneca again, “You live as though you were going to live forever…and fail to note how much time has already passed by” (On the Shortness of Life, 3). This is true as much as it was then as it is now; for notwithstanding the distance of two-thousand years, human nature is little changed. 

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Fear is a very powerful emotion. It drives the stock market down in rapid sell-offs, and keeps people hooked on anxiety-inducing news channels. It can, to our chagrin, also cause people to willfully ignore their mortality and impending death. Whether this is out of sheer ignorance, or out a protective mechanism, it is the fear of the unknown, that keeps us looking away from the inevitable. For will we have a faithful psychopomp to lead us to the Isle of the Blessed, Abraham’s Bosom, or the Elysian Fields? Or will we, perhaps, have to ferry with Charon into Hades or Anubis into the underworld? The musician Conor Oberst captures the harrowing reality of death through his interpretation of the Johannine story of Lazarus:

“Lazarus, Lazarus Why all the tears
Did your faithful chauffer just disappear?
What a lonesome feeling To be waitin’ round
Like some washed-up actress in a tinsel town.”

Lazarus, Loneliness, & Death

One can imagine Lazarus at the crossroads of time and eternity, dead for four days, presumably decomposing in his tomb already, rotting (John 11:17). Where had his faithful psychopomp gone, and to where or to whom should he then go? What a feeling of loneliness both in life and in death! When Jesus and his disciples arrived at the tomb of Lazarus, Mary, his sister, was overcome with sorrow and began to weep (33). Then Jesus wept also (35). While Lazarus was waiting around in loneliness for four days, ultimately Jesus resurrects him with a few simple but powerful words and then “The dead man came out” (44). In the end, however, Lazarus would die again, like all good mortals. Oberst concludes:

“Milk thistle, milk thistle Let me down slow
Just help me go slow I’ve been hurrin’ on
I was poised for greatness I was down and out
I keep death at my heels Like a basset hound
If I go to heaven I’ll be bored as hell
Like a crying baby at the bottom of a well”

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And death is at our heels, or rather, at our doorstep constantly like our culture’s psychopomp, the Grim Reaper. For the disciples, not understanding that Jesus’ intention was to go to Lazarus to raise him back up from the dead, proclaimed in solidarity, “Let us also go, that we may die with him (16). Thus, our lot is sealed, and our ending is secured: we are mortals, what else can be done? Or a better question, where can we go? Neither in height nor depth can we escape our mortality no matter how hard we try through biohacking or transhumanism.

Jesus Feeds the Five Thousand

In the sixth chapter of the gospel of John, right after Jesus performs the miracle of the feeding of the five-thousand and attracted numerous would-be disciples and fair-weather followers, he goes on to say: “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” To the dismay of much of the crown and other disciples, who thereupon abandoned him because it was a “hard saying” and they subsequently turned their backs on him and “no longer followed him” (60, 66). Jesus then asked his inner twelve, “you do not want to leave too, do you?” To which Peter replied, “Lord, to whom [else] shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (68). Kierkegaard commenting on the passage writes thus: “I understand the words of Peter, “To whom shall we go?” to refer to his consciousness of sin. It is this that binds a man to Christianity. And, since it is God, who, through the consciousness of sin, binds every individual person to Christianity, so it must be assumed that he also determines every man’s conflicts individually (Journals and Papers of Søren Kierkegaard, 310).

Facing Mortality & Living in the Present

Conscious of mortality, and living a philosophic life, according to Seneca, can make a “short” life a long life, and therefore a good life. And while the absolute freedom we have been endowed with can, according to Kierkegaard, make us existentially dizzy from the infinity of possibilities, it also induces self-consciousness and an awareness of ones on finitude, and thereby forces us back to the one who has been faithful to us in both life and death: Christ, the faithful psychopomp who will be with us in death, but who is also here with us now, present, in his presence. Therefore, it is not a to where, but a to whom that must propel us, or else we will forever wander aimlessly without a faithful chauffeur. In the beautiful lyrics of Indie-Folk band, Richie Mitch & the Coal Miners:

“And with my youth
Will it be swept away?
This presentness
To be tied to a place?
From North to South,
I’ll search around
To find that sacred place
I’ll kiss the ground on
Seward’s sound
In the spot old ashes lay
I’m shedding skin,
becoming round
I’ll find my hallowed space”

To time and her chains, once again, we bow! Be not sorrowful, be not afraid. Simply be silent. In the meantime, I look forward to the 2025 forthcoming Bob Dylan biopic staring, you guessed it, Timothée Chalamet.

-b