Kaddish

I am returning to write this prologue having already written the work from start to finish. I have lived these days. I have lived this year. I lived, and now I have won for myself another day in this life.

I am returning after having written the work, having gone back and read it, and I see an insufferable person. I see someone I would not like to be around very much — and I know this to be the case because I do not often like spending undirected time with my own up trees — and I cringe.

The thing about this feeling, though, is that it is borne out of improvement. I look back at this last year and do not like the person who I was at the start of it as much as I do the me of today, and so that comes with the corollary: I like the me of today more than the person who began this year.

This is the kernel of joy within that pain. This is the sweet to go along with the bitter. This is that careful balance that has become a core to so many of our tricentenarian lives. When we look back at who we were and cringe, that is the us of today looking back and recognizing the shortcomings we had which we no longer have. We have changed and grown as people: affirming. We might come up with all sorts of quippy advice, promising ourselves that we will not kill the part of ourselves that is cringe but instead the part that cringes, and yet overapply this sentiment to all aspects of ourselves.

I cringe at who I was not out of some irony-poisoned sense of superiority, but out of a recognition that I am happier with who I am now.

Is that a spoiler? Am I spoiling for you, O imagined reader, one of the core conceits behind this work? It is woman against self, and the woman, she who has been a hero since birth, prevails, as all heroes must?

Perhaps.

I do not feel like a hero, no matter my words. I feel like a tired, old woman who lived through the end of the world and came away from the experience wishing she were other than what she is.

And now, here I am: other than I was. Non sum qualis eram. I am not what I used to be.

I have chosen for the epigraph to this memoir a quote by Eliot Weinberger that I think stands more poignantly than some silly bit of mistranslated Heraclitus, because Weinberger speaks specifically to the act of reading — or, more specifically, translating — a poem. It is not a statement on personal growth. It is a statement on active engagement and the ways in which engaging changes us.

There is, curiously, too much placidity in Heraclitus' philosophy for this particular context.

This world is not static.

I am not static.

Change is not happening to me.

I am an actor in this world, and I have within me agency, and I have within my grasp my own destiny. Though my forward momentum may be slow and meticulous, I have time. I have lived 317 years and I will continue to aim for ever greater change over the next 317, not simply allow change to wash over me, for more precious is one hour working toward positive change in this world than all the life of the world to come; and should my life once more cease, and this time for good, then so be it: more precious is one hour of the tranquility of the world to come than all the life of this world.

— What Right Have I of the Ode clade

17 Sh'vat 6163 / 10 February 2403 / systime 279+41

Yom HaShichzur