Effacement

One of the things I’ve been conscious of more than ever since Scot and I started talking about retirement is a sense of my own mortality. Especially since I hit 60, I’ve been increasingly aware that I ’m entering the final phase of my life.

As we journey through Egypt and see things like the fragmentary temples and statues, or gaze at the eroded nose of the Sphinx, I have a heightened realization that, while some things last a long time, nothing last forever. As we’re traveling, I’ve been reading Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet. In a passage about Angkor Wat as he describes the encroachment of the jungle, he characterizes it as “ the world eating itself” – an admirable and exceptionally apt phrase. On this trip, we’ve also learned that certain pharaohs, in order to eradicate the memory of their predecessors, would literally chisel their names and images from the tombs, effacing them from history.

Most likely, nothing that I do or say will last very long at all, but does that matter? My life has been full of the sense I’ve made of it, even if that will quickly fade and succumb to the relentless scouring of the sands of time.