In Position

I want to tell you about time, how strangely it behaves when you haven't got much of it left: after 60 say, or 70, when you'd think it would find itself squeezed so hard that like melting ice it would surely begin to shrink, each day looking smaller and smaller - well, it's not so. The rules change, a single hour can grow huge and quiet, full of reflections like an old river, its slow-turning eddies and whirls showing you every face of your life in a fluid design - your children for instance, how you see them deepened and changed, not merely by age, but by time itself, its wide and luminous eye; and you realise at last that your every gift to them - love, your very life, should they need it - will not and cannot come back; it wasn't a gift at all but a borrowing, a baton for them to pass on in their turn. Look, there they are in this shimmering distance, rushing through their kind of time, moving faster than you yet not catching up. You're alone. And slowly you begin to discern the queer outline of what's to come: the bend in the river beyond which, moving steadily, head up (you hope), you will simply vanish from sight.