'The Whirligig of Time Brings in His Revenges'

A reader asks if I know the work of Isabel Bolton (1883-1975), in particular the novel The Whirligig of Time. Only by name. I do know the title’s origin, spoken by Feste, Olivia’s servant, in Act V, Scene 1 of Twelfth Night: “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” Meaning just deserts, getting precisely what we deserve, which is something few of us, happily, ever get.

A whirligig is a class of child’s toy that include tops. It dates from the mid-fifteenth century. Whirl means pretty what we would expect and a gig, besides being a job for a jazz musician, is a whipping top, the sort that’s wrapped with a string and thrown, according to the OED. I remember my step-grandfather, who grew up in Harrisburg, Pa., recounting how he made money as a kid “gigging” eels in the Susquehanna River and selling them. In this context a gig is “a kind of fish-spear” (OED).

The Dictionary cites Shakespeare’s use of whirligig as part of a complicated set of metaphorical usages: “(a) Something that is continually whirling, or in constant movement or activity of any kind; (b) a fantastic notion, a crotchet; (c) circling course, revolution (of time or events);  (d) a lively or irregular proceeding, an antic;  (e) a circling movement, or condition figured as such, a whirl.” All but (b) seem to apply to Feste’s use. There’s a suggestion that time “toys” with us, that nothing remains in place, that life is perpetual motion. Anthony Hecht adopts the expression in his adaptation of  Horace’s Ode 1:25 as “The Whirligig of Time” (Flight Among the Tombs, 1996):

“They are fewer these days, those supple, suntanned boys

Whose pebbles tapped at your window, and your door

Swings less and less on its obliging hinges

For wildly importunate suitors. Fewer the cries

Of ‘Lydia, how can you sleep when I’ve got the hots?

I won’t last out the night; let me get my rocks off.’

Things have moved right along, and behold, it’s you

Who quails, like a shriveled whore, as they scorn and dodge you,

And the wind shrieks like a sex-starved thing in heat

As the moon goes dark and the mouth of your old dry vulva

Rages and hungers, and your worst, most ulcerous pain

Is knowing those sleek-limbed boys prefer the myrtle,

The darling buds of May, leaving dried leaves

To cluster in unswept corners, fouling doorways.”

Cruel, hardly kind, but a memorable accounting of vanity, especially of the sexual variety.