Impermanence | portfoliolongo

“Impermanent record,” occurred to me as a vague notion. When I mentioned it to Annyth, she suggested that I do a cartoon, and the notion remained a velleity until now.

The title of this post can be attributed to the late Dr. Owen Dukelow, Professor of Philosophy at Washington and Jefferson College. As an undergrad in the mid to late 1970s I took a couple of his classes. I also worked in the college library all four years, and Professor Dukelow would show up now and then and place a stack of his newsletters/bulletins on the front desk for people to take away and read for free. The informal series was entitled, Pardon Me, My Mind Was Wandering. I remember finding his short essays amusing, but I wasn’t mature enough to recognize the themes of equanimity and impermanence. I do now, at least to some extent.

This year, as the national forces of ignorance and authoritarianism mobilize, the folks here at portfoliolongo.com would like the letter M to tell our story. It’s a relatively simple story, not unlike the stories encapsulated over the last 6 years in our previous Christmas letters. It’s a story of some irony, much hope, and absolute impermanence – best summarized in a saying so popular that even President Abraham Lincoln used it in a speech at the Wisconsin State Fair in 1859: “And this, too, shall pass.” (See the excerpt and citation below.)

“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.” (Click here for the full speech.)