Turning Eighty
First, You Cry.
Lying in bed recently, doing nothing, thinking about nothing, I cried. Nothing dramatic, just a few deep, soft waves of sadness that came and went. Still, it felt like a good cry. It happened repeatedly, every few days.
While looking for a reason, my mind went back to senior year in high school. That year I’d been determined to goof off and take a minimal academic load, so I could concentrate on basketball and girls. But my guidance counselor told me it wouldn’t look good on college applications. So I reluctantly signed up for a fourth year of Latin — and along with a handful of fellow scholars and goof-offs, we read the Aeneid of Vergil, an ancient epic that mixes Gods and humans, history and mythology, to tell the story of the founding of Rome by storm-tossed refugees from the Trojan War.
With the very first phrase, you know you’re in the presence of a great writer: Arma virumque cano, writes Vergil — “Arms and the man I sing.” A hero, a war, a song — all promised in three words. And delivered in ten thousand lines of dactylic hexameter without a false note or a missed beat.
And somewhere in the middle, I came upon a phrase that stayed with me forever: Lacrimae rerum.
“The tears of things” is the literal translation — but rerum means more than things. It’s formed from the noun res, the root of the words real and reality. It means all things, or what all things have in common, the ground of existence.
At the ground of existence, we cry.
At 79 and a half, going on 80, I hit the ground and cried. I cried for everything I loved, everything I had lost, for life from beginning to end. I saw my life and all lives flashing into emptiness and uncertainty. I began preparing for my own epic journey.
First, you cry.
— Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips
