Time Should Always Pass So Beautifully
The Romantic poet John Keats meditates on a Grecian urn in his famous eponymous ode and calls it a "foster-child of silence and slow time." The scene upon the ode is always in action, yet never completed; the lovers depicted never kiss but also never age.
We do. We age, time passes--flies, even--and sometimes, our days rush like water, a cascade of work and love and duty and . . . time. Who does not, at times, long for each day to be its own beauty, its own truth, independent of a schedule?
Sometimes, we'd love to stop time and be present in eternity.
That's the thing, though: it--eternity--is always with us. No matter the era, the Greek and Roman gods have always stayed among us: in the names of cars, planets, and, as with this exquisite Victorian lava cameo bracelet, in the days of the week.
Laid out left to right, days-of-the-week bracelets move from Monday to Sunday, with the face of each day's corresponding god or goddess:
Monday: Demeter / Diana. Goddess of the moon, her cameo is gray. You will see the luna (moon) in most romance languages' words for Monday (lunes, lundi, etc.)
Tuesday: Ares / Mars. This god of war wears a plumed helmet and is carved of reddish lava stone. While we see "Mars" in romance languages' "martis," we also see Tuesday emerge from the Norse war god Tyr (and his day: Tirsdag).
Wednesday: Hermes / Mercury. Miercoles, Mercredi--Mercury is Wednesday, and we see his winged cap as he races towards the end of the week.
Thursday: Zeus / Jupiter. In Norse, there is Thorsday; Thor is, of course, the Greco-Roman equivalent of Zeus / Jupiter. Why is his color black? Perhaps it is lava scorched by his lightning bolt. You'll note his laurel crown.
Friday: Aphrodite / Venus. White as the sea foam from which she springs, Aphrodite is associated with Friday . . . no wonder, given she is the goddess of pleasure and love. While the French and Spanish kept the "venere" (desire) in their Viernes and Vendredi, the British turned again to the Norse and named this day after Freya: Friday.
Satuday: Cronos / Saturn. Chronos is the god of time, apt for this "last" day of the week. It is also time, to take a "sabbatical" on this day.
Sunday: Apollo / Apollo (There's only one Sunday!) Gentle Apollo, the beautiful youth, pulls his chariot (the sun) across the sky. Even his portrait in lava has somewhat of a golden hue.
While all centuries have jewelry drawing from classical imagery, there's something particularly special to me that this bracelet's cameos are carved from lava stone. The popularity of lava cameos stems from a nineteenth-century fascination with Pompeii and the Herculaneum, those cities in which time stopped with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Not only could a traveler meditate on both the fleeting and permanance of time, but one could bring back a piece of lava jewelry as souvenir.
Isn't it marvelous and ironic, then: this bracelet of eternal faces, carved from the remenants of the past, marking the passing of a week? Isn't it marvelous to watch time pass this beautifully and, also, not pass at all?
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