Time

Time, time, what is time? asks the criminal played by Peter Lorre in the 1953 cult film, "Beat the Devil." The Swiss manufacture it, the French hoard it, the Italians squander it, the Americans say it is money, and the Hindus say it doesn't exist. As he rattles these off, he counts them on his fingers. You know what I say? I say time's a crook. I thought of this sequence the other day during a trustees' meeting of a charitable foundation.

My grandfather's will established the foundation, which went into effect when he died forty-nine years ago. Under the rules of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which administers his will, the foundation must expire next year, fifty years after he died. So the meeting was devoted to discussing the foundation's final grants and endowments.

I was twenty-nine in 1961 when my grandfather died. At the time, 50 years seemed impossibly far away. But in retrospect, that time has passed quickly. Since 1961, I established a career in a field of which I had never heard and lived for half a lifetime in Israel, of which I knew little and cared about less. I married, raised children, and saw them in their turn marry and begin to raise their own children. I've seen the generations of my grandparents and my parents die, and long ago I started to see my own peers die.

Just as 2011 seemed impossibly far away in 1961, so does 2061 today. My generation will have died out long before then and my grandchildren will be in their fifties and sixties. Life is a dream, my grandfather used to tell me, on our walks together when I was a boy. I thought I understood what he meant: life passes quickly. But it is only now, when I'm older than he was at the time we walked together, that I fully understand what he was trying to tell me: life is short, don't waste it.

Unlike the Swiss, I can't manufacture more time, nor can I hoard it like the French. I've tried not to squander it, although I've not always been successful in that endeavor, and if time is money, I don't have much to show for it. Unlike the Hindus, I believe that time exists and that I won't have another chance to spend it. But do I agree with the character played by Peter Lorre when he said that life's a crook. It fools you into thinking, when you're young, that it will stay with you forever, but by the time you've grown old, you've found that it has stolen away, without your ever having noticed.