20081022

12261 Days

I'm breaking my blog silence to bring you this news flash:

I am a math geek.

Maybe you already knew, but, in case you need convincing, let me drop this on you--today is the one day that my age will be equal to the sum of the ages of my six beautiful children. The short equation (in days) is...

4029+3155+2520+1647+867+41=12261

Those of you who didn't go to school in California might realize that there's an error in that equation. Those of you who were educated in the Golden State will see why the equation works.

Speaking of days, have any of you ever read Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy? I don't want you to get the impression that I'm obsessed with dates, but there were a few lines that really resonated with me. The quote below describes the heroine of the story as she is on the cusp of womanhood and for the first time seriously considers the path that her life is taking.

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year; the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with its dark background of The Chase; also the dates of the baby's birth and death; also her own birthday; and every other day individualized by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor's thought that some time in the future those who had known her would say: "It is the ----th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died"; and there would be nothing singular to their minds in the statement. Of that day, doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know the place in month, week, season or year.


Just so I don't seem like all gloom and doom, let me share the following quote from Charles Dickens as well. "Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!.... his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes."

The secret working of time is terribly interesting to me, and the concept is one that I have no problem thinking of for long periods of--wait for it--TIME. In fact, I also enjoy thinking about thinking about time. Have you ever thought about how you think about or visualize time? The year looks like this to me:



...except the divisions are months and the spiral is a counter-clockwise one.

I'm always curious how people think. How do you see time?

2 comments:

Tamara said...

Yikes! Nobody told me I married a math geek! ha ha

Claremont First Ward said...

Blogger wouldn't let me comment yesterday. But. I'm a bit speechless. I knew you were mathematically gifted (?), but how did you THINK of that in order to figure it out?

I think of time in terms of "I wish I had more of it".