I might die this year, as you might; but noticing that might cause more joy than grief. Life's brevity makes life more precious, and it could make us likelier to enjoy life.
When I looked online for 1700s English writer Samuel Johnson's line about the prospect of hanging in the morning concentrating the mind the night before, I found a website of his quotes on mortality:
http://www.samueljohnson.com/mortalit.html
In the first quote, written in Johnson's fifty-fifth year, Johnson urges himself to resolve better, after having resolved poorly for years. He prays for time to enact better resolutions. I'm in my fifty-fifth year. I resolve to value time more, as it diminishes. Today is January 5, early in the year, when people make New Year's resolutions.
Today would have been my parents' sixty-sixth wedding anniversary, which spurred me to the liquor store. I drink little, but I wanted to drink in their memory. I found the $10 St. Remy French brandy, which I bought in 2014 for my daughter to give to the nurse, now retired, who baptised her the day she was born, Christmas Eve, 1992. The two exchange Christmas gifts less often than they used to; no exchange in 2015.
In the local liquor store, succumbing to incremental privatization, I also found Cuban rum, for my socialist hackles, whiskey for Dad's rusty nail, and a shrinking variety of wine. Mighty labors brought forth a can of Kelowna beer, for $2.00. It cools in my fridge as I type.
I remember going with Dad to the Edson, Alberta liquor store when I was a young boy, decades ago. He bought a case of a dozen stubby bottles of beer for $3.10. The liquor store was in the government building where Dad worked. In my early twenties, I paid $8.50 for a dozen no-name stubby beer in an Edmonton liquor store. Stubby beer bottles are no more. Canadian beer now comes in taller, U.S.-style bottles, but luckily it doesn't yet taste as revolting as U.S. beer, but Budweiser is Canada's best selling beer. I suppose it could clean a window or wash a dog. Don't drink it. Today, the cheapest beer dozen was a four-variety pack of twelve cans from Bowen Island, reduced to $15 from $17.
"We have a champagne taste and a beer income," Mom used to say. I have less than a beer income, but today I had $2.00 for a beer. Drunks, druggies, and gamblers seem to find money to feed their habits, I know, from knowing many addicts. I'm too cheap to overindulge in anything but food, a reduction target this year. You'll see less of me, but I'm still here.
Getting back to death and joy, I recalled, as I walked back from the liquor store, snow fluffy on evergreens, that my daughter, looking in one of my poetry anthologies a few months ago, found a poem that said that, each year, one lives through the day on which one will die in a future year. I've had that book since 1979 and this was the first I heard of that poem. Perhaps, like Emily Dickinson, I should stop and look for that poem of death, before death stops for me, to paraphrase Emily.
Walking home in a postcard winter scene, it occurred to me that each year one's death is likelier. Each year, each day, each hour is one less to come. This could depress a person. It depressed Samuel Johnson. Time's passage inspires rather than depresses me, though. It inspires me to use time well, which means to learn, laugh, and love, as my blog profile says.
Enjoy life. Burn in with a gemlike flame. Perhaps you know that famous "gemlike flame" phrase from 1800s English writer Walter Pater. I first learned it half my life ago in an Ottawa university English literature course. Pater advises us to find ecstasy in life, such as he finds in art and song:
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/pater/renaissance/conclusion.html
If you want me, you'll find me on fire for life, burning as long as possible.
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