(Earnie Hemingway, second from left, celebrates the New Year with pal Gary Cooper in the year some of us were born, 1951. They are moving gradually forward in that line in Cuba at Havana’s Club Floridita. Things would transition to occur suddenly once they got a table inside).

Just a quick note this morning, since there are action items that need accomplishment on this misty morning. The New Year arrived at 8:38 PM last night. We said a casual “hello” to it walking down the corridor to the sleeping quarters. It looked a little odd with that numeral “3” stuck at the end. It was headed the other direction from our gradual progress, and had a determined sort of look to it.

There are a couple sudden departures to report from the last day of yesterday’s year. Pope Benedict, the 16th Holy Father called by that name, passed in the last day of the last past year. So did a lady of journalistic note, Ms. Barbara Walters. He was 95, she was 93. They lived at a remarkable time in the history of our species. Say what you wish about things like war and weather, we lived in what will be counted as the most beneficial time our species has walked this world. The Pope and the Lady were fortunate to have lived the vast change we have shared in a gradual progression, leaving what is to come in a more rapid, even ‘sudden,’ manner.

Things also moved along with a certain urgency in the time we shared with those two persons. The “Pax Americana” is something we served and lived. It is a fairly brief interlude, compared with other times attributed to the Romans and the Brits. The Peace was enforced by two great powers, each armed with a new scourge that brought an atomic peace. The alternative to peace was so horrific that any previous violence between nations was rendered mute in comparison. That was a sudden realization after a gradual acceptance of the horrific.

The gradual part of our history that followed was actually conducted at incredible speed. Reallyincredible. The Scientists at Cornell University have calculated the orbital speed of our Earth as being about 67,000 miles per hour. It seems gradual by the way we live it in 365 days per lap. But in the places we sit, sipping our Chock Full O’ Nuts, it includes motion of 1,116 miles per minute, or in simpler terms, nearly twenty miles per second.

Look up suddenly, and the gradual motion we peceive has taken us a hundred miles through the heavens. And in returning our sight to the words before us in this new morning, another hundred. And across the equivalent of a continent before we can think of another cup of java.

The collapse of the Pax that followed the demise of the Soviets was similar to Earnest Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy. Ernie was an author of note, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. Some of us were three years old at the time and naturally paid little attention to it.

He was asked about some of his financial issues, spawned by a standard of living outsized in his time. He hung out with movie stars at exotic places like Cuba that were gradually changing to something abrupt- sudden, if you will- answered the honest query with a couple lines uttered by the character he dubbed ‘Mike Campbell’ in his 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises.” It was published when future Pope Gregory’s mother carried him to term. It went like this:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
“What brought it on?”
“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends. False friends. Then I had creditors, too. Probably had more creditors than anybody in England.”

We are thankful not to be in the same circumstances starting this particular trip around the sun. We have to apply a gradual metric to it, since we have done more than seventy of the passages around our sun, so there is some experience in the elliptical adventures. The trips start gradually and progress suddenly. Our life expectancy, taken on average, was marked at nearly 80 trips around the solar orb. That sum has declined a bit in the shadow of a global illness, but the lives of Benedict and Barbara indicate we can gradually reach longer spans.

Ernie H. did not. He decided to leave after 61 trips around the sun. He was not a family friend but a definite connection. His greatest fame occurred when we were already walking in the same world in some of the same places he had. His family cabin was just up the road on a lovely lake, a place known to all of us a hundred trips through the vastness of space. Mom was a local literary analyst of his time on our shared lake. She even knew one of the ladies Ernie had courted as a young man in the little town on the Big Lake. It gave our time on this world a commonality with his, the gradual change induced by years. Followed by a sudden transition to something else.

We can savor it this morning: a sudden click (or, better: ‘whirr’) of a hand on a clock-face, and bingo! We are here on a new whirl around the glowing molten sphere. This new trip is said to have some gradually accumulated joy and the possibility of some rapid change.

Ernie understood it. We suspect we will, too. Heck, we are already started and have successfully hurtled several hundred thousand miles into this new year already. Not a complaint to be seen in any of them so far. But of course, that is the gradual part of this ellipse. We will see whether 2023 has anything sudden in store, won’t we?

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com