"Diamonds are forever," so says the song—and even in geological terms it's true. Diamonds were formed three billion years ago, although their creation required a certain kind of rock to be forced from deep inside our planet to its surface in a very short time; probably nine to twenty-five hours. I've been thinking about how speed and permanence affect our lives and the diamond seems a perfect metaphor, two-thirds as old as the planet and yet formed in a single day.
This has become important to me because I've reached the age where my contemporaries are dying. Suddenly the world is a rather frightening place in which those I grew up with are leaving, not because of car crashes or acts of God, but through disease and illness. What seemed to be forever has become very temporary indeed. At the same time, my teenage son has just achieved that point of life where everything seems, to him, to likely continue forever—he has the invulnerable confidence of masculine adolescence and the optimism of youth. When he walks home along city streets at night, my own sense of the fragility and impermanence of life collides with his belief that nothing can harm him. So he continues to stroll in the dark and I continue to worry.
That's the personal equation—the geometry of aging that suddenly turns an endless line into a full stop. The emails and phone calls that announce another friend has died. The loss that can never be replaced.
Then there's the global equation. Human beings—as a species—seem to believe we will be here forever and nothing can harm us, and yet we're like kids whistling in the dark. Any moment a car could knock us down, a mugger might slide a knife between our ribs, or we could slip on the pavement, fracture our skull, and fade gently away in the gloom between streetlights, no one ever noticing. Yes, I'm talking about climate change.
We are barely adolescents on the surface of this planet. Looking at the world from a diamond's perspective, we've hardly been around a moment. And yet, like the cataclysmic events that formed the diamonds in the short but decisive period of just about one day, we're changing our home with a rapidity and scope that ensure it can never return to its former condition.
Is this what we mean to do?
No, of course not. The thing is, we can't understand what we're doing—we don't have the equipment to appreciate our effect. We're human. Pick a violet, a single, humble flower and inhale the fragrance. Now hold that inhalation for a count of six, exhale, and smell the flower again. The vast majority, around 99.4 percent of us, will smell nothing at all. The human olfactory system can't cope with the complexity involved in a violet's scent and so it shuts down for a while. Count to a hundred, inhale again and the wonderful fragrance will return. But it never went away; it was our ability to recognize it that failed, not the violet's aroma.
Believe it or not, it's not just noses that can't cope with the violet—it's impossible to extract or distill the fragrance from the flowers in any cost-effective fashion. The rare and valuable absolute oil costs around 150 dollars for an eighth of an ounce and is made from the leaves, not the blooms. Science isn't competent enough to deal with this wildflower either, and not even the prestigious perfumery industry—second only to the diamond industry for its power and prosperity—can manage to turn this elusive scent into a paying concern.
There's nothing more fleeting than the smell of a violet, nothing more shy than the flower's appearance in spring, and yet humanity can't begin to understand it, let alone master it. Shouldn't we consider this as we empty our reservoirs, pollute our oceans, and build nuclear reactors whose waste may still be dangerous in tens of thousands of years?
We should, but we're not mature enough to understand it yet. Like our noses when they sniff a violet, we can't cope with all the complexity of what we're doing. Like my teenage son, we think that nothing can harm us. One day we're going to wake up and find that our endless planetary line has turned into a full stop. I just hope that when it happens we're ready for it.
Author Bio: KAY SEXTON has an overdeveloped work ethic and a fig tree in her garden. She finds it hard to reconcile the two. In the past twelve months she has been published by E2K, Literary Potpourri, MiPo, Pierian Springs, SaucyVox.com, Smokelong Quarterly, The Sidewalk’s End, Thought Magazine, Wired Art for Wired Hearts, and Yankee Pot Roast. The fig tree is also flourishing.
You can email Kay at
kay@charybdis.freeserve.co.uk
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Diamonds and Violets