An Ode to Advancements in Technology

O, wonderful spork!
Crownéd plastic king of spoons,
Better than a fork

(Kate Schultz)

Timeliness

Chess is a game intensely focused on the value of the moment. While the hours of the clock stretch on, the moment of play is far more eternal. Quite frankly, time is not about the moment so much as a sweeping survey of multiple moments, each deprived of their infinite significance and generalized into the likewise infinite abyss which we so lackadaisically entitle “time.”
Time—the word is all too ubiquitous, so that now the significant meanings are hashed and debased. They say that time is priceless or that “time is money.” Everything is qualified by what its worth to the author of that very moment and yet, a moment spent pondering the value of an activity is a moment lost. Either a moment is squandered and thus lost, or its infinite value is finite production.
At this point it becomes clear that each individual will claim an equally unique measure of the productivity of his/her moment. Even when we admit to wasting time or having a particularly productive afternoon, time was ours to use as we saw fit or as we were externally coerced (or paid) to. And while it would be inappropriate to slander another’s “well spent time” (even in the case of papers which have become shadows of their former selves), there must be some generalized key to productivity; some rule that divides wasted moments and profitable moments.
In the least specific of terms, one could say, that which benefits the self, another, or the whole, and preferably the best combination of the three (with increasing weight to the larger groups) with reasonable room for human error and exceptions. Perhaps the best advice is that a moment ought to be ‘spent’ to realign our value of the moment with something more eternal than the sum of each moment passed thus far. (Thomas Reher)

Father Time

Time is like an emotionally absent Father watching over us, detached but influential in his mere existence. He does not involve himself in our petty problems—does not share our anger or joy or grief—but stands outside of us, constant in his passive destruction.

We measure our lives by highlights: victories, losses, pleasures, betrayals. Minutes and hours are relative, fitted between ballet recitals and high school graduation. A moment may seem tortuously long in its execution, but in its completion it becomes one of a hundred-million others, each as inconsequential as that before it. A moment is nothing without a corresponding event to make it tangible.

And yet those events, too, are worth only as much as their memory. A first birthday party, so significant to a parent, means nothing to a child with no recollection of it. The momentary mortifications and petty victories earned in high school are free to completely evaporate once that cap has been thrown, just as college will soon pass away with only highlights and summaries left behind in scrapbooks. Life and time make up a yearbook of our lives, only as important as each picture and caption we put into it. We may save nothing. We may save everything.

Ashes to ashes, the world will not remember us for long after we leave it. Family and friends will leave in their time, and their memories of us may follow to the other side. But they will not stay here. Two or three generations is all it may take for a person’s life to be erased from existence. His personal victories, losses, pleasures, and betrayals will mean nothing to those left behind him, just another casualty of Father Time.

At the finish line, we all end as casualties. (Jessee Cordell)

Note from the Editor

(Coming soon)