The Time of Endings

I suppose any time is a Time of Endings......

It just depends on where you are standing in relation to the beginnings.......

So, callow youth of this day, hearken ye unto the musings of this old codger, nay, indulge him with a hearing.......

For soon, so soon, time's fleet foot will have marched the seemingly impossible distance between your "now", at your Absolute Beginning, and will have taken you right to the very threshold of your "then", that far-off, nebulous, theoretical-seeming door marked 'Exit'............

I speak as one who knows only too well he is standing if not in the doorway itself, then much closer to the approach to it than is in all conscience comfortable.

And I wish to clap, whoop, cheer and applaud those who pass through it before me.

David Bowie is dead.

No-one born after a certain date will have any idea of how influential he really was.

No, really.......

Consider.

I watched him on TV as Ziggy Stardust in the early Seventies. My parents were watching with me. They had lived through World War Two. Of my grandparents, then living, two were Edwardians and one was a Victorian..............

Imagine then, their reaction to Ziggy.

"Slack-jawed disbelief" doesn't even get close.........

Ian Kilmister is dead.

If ever there was a life lived at full throttle, all the way to eleven, maximum overdrive, then his was that life.

Ed Stewart is dead.

As far from being a pop/art/acting/style-icon or fully flipped-out sex and drugs and rock and roller as it is to imagine, yet dear in the memories still of those of us who were Children of the Seventies.

And I will cheer and whoop and holler to the skies for them all.

As one ages, time appears to accelerate. The years go by much faster, it seems.

I have considered why this is so: when we are twenty, a year is one twentieth of our lives. At sixty, one twentieth of our lives is three years. So what took a year when you're twenty lasts only four months when you're sixty.......

Thus, do we and our little lights accelerate ever the more quickly toward the heart of the BlackStar?

And vanish into a naked singularity?

If so, let us be kind, and comfort each other while we may.

And be not afraid of The Dark.