Early Swallows, Cycles, and the Question.

I saw the first swallow a couple of days ago and my thought went straight to that old maxim: ‘One swallow does not a summer make.’ Today there were five in the same place, and it still isn’t summer.

Nevertheless, the appearance of the first swallow is one of those significant events, like Christmas, which remind you that another orbit has come full circle and another footstep been taken on the road of life. And then those nagging old questions begin again:

The first one is easy: I wonder how many footsteps I have to take before I fall and fade away. The second concerns the matter of personal dualism – the notion that the mortal body and the immortal consciousness are independent entities working in partnership for the course of a human lifetime, before the consciousness completes a cycle and starts another one. I’m curious to know how much of me is my mortal body and how much my immortal consciousness, because that raises the most important question: when I die, how much of me will I keep, and how much will rot in the ground or go up in smoke?

And then I remembered that one of Delius’s loveliest short works is called Late Swallows. Apposite, I think.