Bring me the head of Andie MacDowell
People used to say: There are no pockets in a shroud. Nowadays, of course, most folks wouldn’t be seen dead in a shroud, so, as sayings go, this one is not exactly dancing on the tip of many tongues. These days, people would not get the meaning anyway.
Once, the pockets & shrouds expression was used to remind people that life was short, so that they’d better focus on more spiritual matters – i.e. not mess up so badly that they’d spend the afterlife in a place where a simple shroud would last not all that much longer than the proverbial snowball.
These days, when someone would be gauche enough to bring up the small matter of everyone’s certain and shared future, a nervous and awkward jocularity would follow this faux pas – to avoid a silence, which in itself could have served to remind people of that final and, above all, quiet destination.
The only lesson though that modern people would take from the old saying, would be that, since life is so short, you should stuff it with frenzied activity, needless complications and lots of expensive and quite useless stuff. And never mind those archaic fears of the Pit. The Bible’s Man is born in sin has been replaced with L’Oréal’s Because you’re worth it.
So, when people are not in the actual pursuit of the latest book about happiness, they will project their depressing fixations on all things mineral, vegetable or animal – or waste their time with mad quests of endurance, to mortify their terminally bored body and mind.
To make matters much, much worse though: spring is approaching, again, like some beast slouching towards Jerusalem – with all the highly predictable brouhaha about this year’s ‘what to wear at the beach‘ and countless articles about the latest diets and dire warnings about skin cancer, anorexia and chlamedia.
After spring: summer. The season of pointless blockbuster movies, prequels & sequels all; the season of endless barbecues and bad summer hits, displayed shamelessly in public places, of fat men in loud shirts and their fat wives in even louder voices, of children screaming through every pore of extended daylight…
Hobbes wrote of lives ‘made solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. If only we’d have it so good – for nothing has changed but this: that ’short’ has turned into ‘endlessly drawn-out’.
Let’s hear it for those good old shrouds – and maybe an updated version of the saying, so, that after a long, long life, spent in haste and wanton wastefulness, we should finally be ready to acknowledge that Every shroud has a silver lining.
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