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Beware the ides of March!
How we measure our years
Shakespeare
“Beware, the ides of March,” Shakespeare’s soothsayer cautioned Julius Caesar in 44BC. He compared past tainted March fifteenths to help the emperor navigate a way forward. But Caesar didn’t care! He wanted to live an ordinary day where could soak in the baths, host a lavish dinner party, vomit, and repeat. He was warned but he paused just briefly and then went about his business, saying in his own ancient way, “Whatevs.” Caesar had no respect for this marker of time.
T.S. Eliot
“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,” T.S Elliot lamented in his early twentieth century poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” “…Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions…” He warns himself as his nostalgia, rumination, and hope swirls in the kitchen utensil. This outcry is no less urgent than that of the soothsayer. Prufrock’s clock is internal and psychological. But, unlike Caesar’s nonchalant reaction, Prufrock has great regard for time’s passage: probably too much vigilance for his own psychological well-being.
Jonathan Larson
‘Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes…How do you measure a year?” Jonathan Larson asked this…
