What is one of the few things that are equal between the richest and poor among us? What cannot be saved or hoarded, but must be spent completely every day, with everyone receiving the same ration? It is, of course, the time we have in a day. To be sure, there are some people who have more time overall in their lives, but to the extent that we are allotted time on a day by day basis, every day we all begin with the same 24 hours and must spend that time. It cannot be saved for a rainy day, and no matter what you spend on it, it must be spent. And when one’s time is gone, it cannot be recovered, no matter how one may want to.

It is said that time is one of the three perennial subjects of poetry, the others being love and death. It is not hard to imagine why this is so. A poet often stares into memory and pulls long ago scenes into mind, remembering what it was like to be young while one is aging, what a past love was like and whether it could have turned out another way, to wonder whether it would ever be possible to combine wisdom and energy together. For all of us, time is inexorable, moving steadfastly in one direction, the sands in the hourglass falling to the bottom, leaving us with less and less of it. We do not know when our time will run out, but we all live our lives with a sense that our lives are filled with loss and decay and that try as we might, there is nothing we can do to arrest its influence on our lives, as we see our lives and the world around us fall apart.

It can be hard to distinguish between the different sorts of cycles of our world and of our lives. We can see the regimes around us in the world showing signs of decay, but we do not know if there will be a chance for them to revive again in a different form. On the time scale of our own lives, short as they are, it can be hard to know what the future holds. At what point in the divided kingdom of Israel and Judah was it certain that their kingdoms would not endure but would become subsumed in an age of imperialism that would last for millennia? At what point did that become obvious in Egypt too? At what point would a citizen of Rome or of one of their cities know that the empire had gone too far? Would this have felt different in England than it did in Italy or Anatolia? When did a citizen of Persepolis or Ctesiphon realize their world was at an end and that a new world was coming to them that they could not even imagine? When will that be true for us as well?

And yet, although we cannot hoard time, some people try. Once people achieve some sort of power in their lives, they never want to let it go. Once someone believes that they are an expert in how other people should live their lives and fancy themselves to be experts at seeing what others do wrong and could do better, it scarcely matter that they lack the energy or mental skills to do much of anything for themselves, they still want to receive the respect and obedience due to experts. One sees this tendency in the sort of cadaverous people who cling on to institutional power, unwilling to give it up because they do not think anyone can succeed them, and so they seek to turn offices that should have healthy turnover into ones where people cling onto them as long as there is life and breath in them. Perhaps it is knowing that we do not have forever but also knowing we have right now that encourages some people to cling on to power so tightly, as if it was worth striving for in the first place. But that is a subject, I suppose, for another day.