Life goes by as if it had wings,
and every Christmas puts
another year on your shoulder.
Note: A Russian poet named Andrei Andreevich Voznesenski paraphrased this proverb for the modern age:
Along a parabola life like a rocket flies,
Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow.
Parabolic Ballad [1960]
This week’s seanfhocal uses the metaphor that each year of life adds to the burden. Thomas Hobbes built his philosophy around a similar notion in his famous aphorism “the life of man [is] solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes’ axiom was adopted by the X-generation bumper sticker, “Life sucks, then you die.” But the Celtic world-view does not accept such a fatalistic attitude towards life. For example, an unknown medieval Irish poet wrote an epigram:
Avoiding death
takes too much time, and too much care
when at the very end of all,
Death catches each one unaware.
Peter Berresford Ellis, The Druids 1994, p. 209
Daltaí na Gaeilge wishes that you are burdened by nothing but gifts as this holiday season arrives to close out the year.
