PERSONAL EPILOGUE

Because the text of this book, though read in time, is set out in space, you, my much put-upon reader, can see that the end is in sight. Your predominant emotion may be one of relief. My own feelings are more mixed.

Of Time and Lamentation has been a dim possibility for as long as I have been thinking philosophically. I first seriously considered writing about time over 25 years ago. I was playing beach cricket with my (now grown-up) children on the last day of our summer holiday. The holiday had been perfect and I was consumed with anguish at the prospect of the coming scattering, our being dispersed after a wonderful fortnight together into our separate preoccupations, prefiguring the wider dispersal as our lives diverged. The nearest image of transience – of a handful of seeds thrown in the air, briefly together before parting to fall to our separate fates – was unbearable, if perhaps a little premature. I had therefore to take hold of time.

As originally conceived, Of Time and Lamentation was to be a collection of short pieces of what I hoped would be poetic prose. The idea was of something that would connect the puzzles with the epiphanies, the 2,500 years of argument and conversation, with the pangs felt when someone has said goodbye, another has died, a way of life has melted, or we have discovered that we have reached the age when there are more farewells than greetings, more last times than first. It would encompass the world new in a baby's first cry or a child's first day at school, old in a headstone whose letters are infilled with moss; the leaves fluttering in the sunlight and the rings of hoarded afternoons in the sawn log. Or the mystery of the determinate past of my footsteps in the snow and the indeterminate future of the unprinted fields ahead. Or unify the flower clock in the park with the atomic clock in the laboratory.