Clouds of meaning

“What bothered me about this terrible recognition was the way in which the evidence of past things lies before us, trailing clouds of meaning… and we miss it!”

Hugh Hood – ‘A New Athens’

In my last posting – with reference to the start of my final term at the School – my train of thought terminated with a perhaps slightly unexpected reference to the circle of life. It was not the first time that this notion has featured in this eclectic assemblage of jottings.

I find myself – as life progresses – increasingly aware of its oblique nature. The events of the past make appearance alongside that which is present and – indeed –  that which is yet to come. Should an analog assist at this point you might try imagining that you are standing on the face of a huge clock at – say – seven o’clock. You can look back across the clock face to three o’clock – and indeed look ahead to ten o’clock, but when all is said and done time will still appear to sweep by in a continual circuit – a sort of temporal Mexican wave – with midnight marking both the end of the old and the start of a new cycle.

To what – I hear you ask – might this metaphysical mood be attributed?

On Friday last I attended the funeral and wake of a widely loved and sadly prematurely deceased member of the School’s support staff. The turnout was of such proportion that the diminutive chapel at the cemetery was almost literally bursting at the seams, the magnitude of which congregation might at least have offered some small consolation to the grieving relatives.

Such occasions do of themselves have a tendency to promulgate the philosophic. A little more than a year ago – in March 2014 – I posted this piece on the occasion of a not dissimilar event that had contemporaneously marked the the passing of one life and the arrival of another. The Kickass Canada Girl and I had attended the memorial service for a very old friend, the day before hosting a gathering at which was present a very dear but considerably younger friend, whose four month old baby boy inevitably and utterly stole the limelight.

At last Friday’s gathering the self-same friend (whose connection to the School was the source of our friendship) was once again present – this time bearing another very recent and as yet unmet addition to the family – a three week old daughter. On both occasions it was impossible not to be moved to the quiet contemplation of higher matters.

It would seem that – in these days – even our reminders of the cyclical nature of existence are now arriving periodically…

Perhaps the ultimate cybernetic system!