April 24, 2020

Questions for Father Abraham

How durable are we? How long
can we endure? Intelligible answers
depend on definitions and measurements,
of course. The relevant metric is time,
but in what units? Seconds? Minutes?
Generations? Millenia? Four score and
seven years? And these are human-made
units. How are they otherwise intelligible?
If you are a mayfly, how do you divide
your day, the single day in which your life
spans from one end to the other?
Perhaps, in that case, it is "you" that is
unintelligible, any "you" apart from
your kith and kin. "You" do not endure.
And yet, the mayfly persists.
But we are not mayflies. Definitions
matter. Rome was not built in a day.
Nor did it – did they, the Romans –
fall in a day. It took time, the undoing,
the unbuilding, generations to unravel
a delicate "we" – assuming it was not
a mirage to begin with, or worse, a
fiction of hindsight, the proposition
of historians only, glorious or garish or
ghastly, depending on the point of
view. But let us assume, arguendo,
some real-time "we," tenuous and frail,
tethered to the bodies of those within
the span of the Republic, the Empire,
by the thinnest of threads, the last fibers
of a severed umbilical cord. Did it endure?
Does it? In what was that "we" conceived?
Not Liberty. To what was that "we" dedicated?
Not the proposition that All Are Created
Equal. Surely not, right? That is the test
of our time, isn't it? But who are "we"?
Are "we" – We The People – up to the test?
Can "we" long endure? Time will tell,
though perhaps not intelligibly.