Time Flies, My Mother Used to Say, and She Was Right

We better get busy cause time’s a-wasting.

Portrait of a young lute player by Francesco Ubertini. Photo by the author.

In a museum visit today I kept running into reminders that ruminating about the passage of time is an ageless obsession. It shows up in this painting created 500 years ago, a pleasant portrait of a lute player flanked on both sides by symbols of time. The flowers on his right are fading and an inscription on the hourglass…