sure time

3 hours 25 minutes to my 28th birthday...

While I'm firmly on home soil for this one, 2 years ago I was on the piste in Italy. Last year, for the big 2-7, I found myself at Angkor Watt in Cambodia and I challenge anyone to find a grander, more humbling backdrop for a birthday! The measly year I'd aged was dwarfed by the immensity of Angkor's history, all 3000-odd years of it. I read a quote at an exhibition once:

"To comtemplate ruins is not to make a voyage into history but to experience time, sure time" (Marc Auge, Les Temps des Ruines)

Although I couldn't articulate it so well, I think I experienced that same revelation on my 27th birthday. I turned a corner, having completed a lap of the inner perimeter of a particularly overgrown, jungle-encroached temple. I found myself somewhat overcome by a feeling of dizzying immensity, of epoch spanning grandieur. I perched on a rock, itself having tumbled at some unknown point from a previously lofty position atop the wall of the ancient temple. There I sat, staring and distant, my mind trying to somehow process the page of this 3D history book that presented itself to me. Trees engulfed parts of the temple, clutching doorways and walls in their roots. The temple must have been ancient and deserted long before trees were allowed to take root in its brickwork, and these trees were staggeringly old. The temple itself, then, was profoundly ancient. I was 27 years old, inconsequentially youthful. I will be utterly forgotten when travellers of the distant future comtemplate that same temple and encounter that same sense of humbling antiquity.

Well, Marc Auge said it all really. Sure time.

The irony is that, depsite the feeling of comparative youth, it was the first birthday I've had when I've felt like an adult.