Areopagus Volume XXXIX

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the thirty ninth volume of the Areopagus. It's difficult to believe we've arrived at the 10th March already - how time flies! Perhaps we can find some solace in the verse of John Hall, whose 1627 poem On an Houre-Glasse is a rather beautiful rumination on the rushing of time:

MY life is measur’d by this glasse, this glasse
By all those little Sands that thorough passe.
See how they presse, see how they strive, which shall
With greatest speed and greatest quicknesse fall.
See how they raise a little Mount, and then
With their owne weight doe levell it agen.
But when th’ have all got thorough, they give o’er
Their nimble sliding downe, and move no more.
Just such is man whose houres still forward run,
Being almost finisht ere they are begun;
So perfect nothings, such light blasts are we,
That ere we’re aught at all, we cease to be.

So perfect nothings, such light blasts are we. Exquisite. Even if we don't agree with Hall's conclusions about the human condition, it's hard not t…