by Richard Stern

At my age--the most telling way for me to convey that is to say that my oldest son will be 56 years old tomorrow--one of life's joys is the formation of "temporal chords," parallels or "rimes" in time and space, and then the discovery of ways to record, express, and make sense of them. At this age, they are "found" everywhere, the latest for me in the day's University of Chicago Chronicle whose two lead stories deal with 1) the discovery of the remains of a fierce battle which destroyed the town of Hamoukar in Syria about fifty-five hundred years ago and 2) the award of the year's University of Chicago alumni medal to James Watson who, in the April 1953 issue of Nature, announced that he and Francis Crick had figured out the structure of the "copying mechanism for the genetic material." The common theme is, I suppose, the repetitiveness--the sustenance--of the human condition, its bio-chemical mechanism and the deposits and debris which testify to it. It's clear to most of us that our daily life and decision-making can't be chained to the past but that those of us lucky enough to have the leisure to learn about and reflect on it find that its most bitter and painful stings are less painful, less destructive if they are placed in the perspective of repetition and comparison. (This may be small consolation to those bleeding from today's wounds.) Does this ease diminish our responsibility to act in the present? Perhaps not, but it is often the actuality for those of my age who "have been there," have "seen it all," "done it all," "heard it all." I testify here that this is not the case for this citizen, who, although his hatred may be less fierce and his suffering less intense, finds himself far more than ever before in the past grieving over those he does not know, the 20 year old soldiers whose life ends in a tangle of steel and blood on an Iraqi road or the beautiful black-eyed Iraqi twelve year old whose house and body have been exploded by an ideology-maddened neighbor who should have been doing what for years he'd habitually done, embraced her with celebration and love.