Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them. ~Dion Boucicault
Time goes, you say? Ah no!Alas, Time stays, we go.~Henry Austin Dobson
Who is this woman? She looks a lot like my mother... well she looks a lot like what my mother looked like when she was young, when she was a model.
This woman is perhaps still alive, perhaps a grandmother, perhaps with children who know of this image, perhaps not.
Do her grandchildren like this image? Are they embarassed by it? Would it be a scandal in the community if it were to be revealed at the local church bazaar?
Time! the corrector when our judgments err. ~Lord Byron
Time heals what reason cannot ~ Seneca
If so, in another 40 years that embarassment will be forgotten, that shame wiped clean by the death of all those who gave shame and all those who accepted it.
In the meantime we have this image, this pose, this lovely young girl and the shape of her limbs. It's not a great image, not one of the classics, but it is a photograph of a real person, who lived and, I hope, loved and led a full life doing what she wanted to do.
She met a photographer, perhaps he paid her, perhaps he was a boyfriend or a husband. She may have been shy and took her clothes off in another room, she may have been bold and left a pile consisting of a shirt, pants, socks and on top of it all, panties, perhaps red with a ribbon at the side.
Perhaps she was a student, making some money to pay for her education. A life model for the fine art department of the local college. Maybe she was a math major and went on to have a career as a teacher. This must have been before the internet because she wasn't fired for posing like this. Or at least I hope she was not.
Watches are so named as a reminder - if you don't watch carefully what you do with your time, it will slip away from you. ~Drew Sirtors
I often say that everyone should pose nude while they are young and fit. If they do not they will not have an image like this to share with the grandkids when their kids aren't looking... or just to pull out late at night and say "I used to look like that", then put it away again.
What stops people is shyness about their own bodies, fear of what their families will say, and most upsetting of all, worry that they will be denied a job or hindered somehow in their careers if someone sees the photos and recognizes them. Very rarely do I talk with a potential model who will not pose nude because he or she believes it is wrong, there is always an outside reason. What will other people say about me, about my body?
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. ~Carl Sandburg
I have some wood in my shop called bog oak. It fell into a bog about 5000 years ago and lay there getting blacker and blacker until someone hauled it out 5 years ago, dried it and cut it.
Think about that tree, it lived about the time that man invented writing. Cities were still a new idea. Think about the civilization that existed then, kings and judges, religions and gods, dead for thousands of years.
Think about a man sitting under that tree, worried about what the old women in the village would say about him and what he did the night before. What was it? Or perhaps he hadn't done it yet, perhaps he decided that the old women were too terrible to face and so he did what they wanted, and he lived the rest of his life in regret. Perhaps he became a rich man who died owning a lot of land. A rich man who did as he was supposed to do, but never got to do the thing he most wanted to do for fear he wouldn't have that money when he died.
How do you feel about that?
Pick my left pocket of its silver dime, but spare the right - it holds my golden time! ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
Read that quote again, more carefully this time. In the time it takes to make bog oak not only will you and I be forgotten, but our civilization will be at an end with perhaps three or four having come between. Mankind may not even be able to understand this writing... provided the computers it lives on replicate it for that many years. Hideously unlikely
Yet in 5000 years it is just possible that this photograph will still exist, and someone then will look at it and wonder, hope, that the girl had a good life.
Surely we can wish the same for ourselves and stop living for other people. Surely we can start living like we, and the old women in the village, will be forgotten dust in a thousand years.