All of history (nearly)

He died and was born in the same year
and between birth and death came close
to seeing all human history

or so it is thought.
He certainly saw
its end: He survived

with a handful others as the future burned away, as seeds of the past

fell on fertile ground.

He would not count (although he might) the years when all was dark
and food if he could even scrape it from the floor of the still-young forest tasted like nothing.

At all.

As new life sprung up, a new sun ripened in the sky, new campfires lit the nights, he kept quiet, chastened, and later started to lose his younger years. Or brushed what he retained aside. Who needed dreams of windmills, trains, and children’s carousels

among other humans puzzled by the wheel?

Here one should mention: Though his memories left him, his knowledge did not. This is possible, you know. You can do it yourself. You know a lot of things; you probably can’t remember when you learned each of them; at least I cannot. He knew

that he had lived for thousands of years already, and that there had been a world like ours, he knew it without the benefit of subjective memory, he knew it impersonally when that world again began congealing

around him, when the wolves allied with us, when the grasses domesticated us, when the resulting multi-genome species seized ungulants

and made machines out of them, when cereals settled us in houses for their convenience and houses ate stone, and ore, metabolized, transformed
far beyond their ability to cope
he knew the significance of all that.

He knew that time was passing, friends and lovers aging, transforming, from lives to absences to remembered fact and he was fine with that, he felt

just barely present himself

humanity was catching up. Writing made their memory-to-fact-pipeline a common experience, and History, now it could be recorded, into an entity of note; he knew the significance of that.

Was it recognition or just recollection of fact
that alerted him to the nature of repetition? Did he remember

reading about those conquerors, those poets, inventors, politicians
in the very early decades of his life
(before the dissolution of records and so much more)? It’s not even known 

if he wondered why they had exactly the same names (he recalled all their names) as the conquerors, poets, inventors and politicians turning up now, in exactly the same order, nor if the names of those not recorded (or recorded by time of birth and death and nothing else) were the same as well

they may have been, and he may have remembered, but he never told.
It is known that he never tried to change a thing, neither improve nor avert,
feeling, as mentioned, barely present in this life, and in the greater scheme of things:
Not at all.

What we do know is: He never completed the cycle. His health declined (a condition

unfathomable to him before)

just as the same years
on the same calendar
with the same months named for the same dynasty of conquerors
(in what folks of our own popular culture would call record-keeping at the meta level)
(because the world meta,

(like history itself)

was now divorced from its own referent)

he saw: The year he knew he had been born, and the year named “current” by those who decided
such things were coming closer and closer together, and he gathered us up,

his current lovers and friends
and let us know: He would not make it to his birth; that he would die
at the latest on an earlier date in that year,

he only suspected this
(conjectured, by his failing health)
but he got it right
and we lost him.

Later in that year, indeed, a child with his identity and name was born.

Whether it was the same child and would live through the same end, the same renewal and recurrence of history, or another child else, with similar characteristics, bound for a future history so like our own he would recall it as it occurred, is hard to say: Because

they never met, both interpretations can be true, perhaps they really are, perhaps time has two natures, contradictory but interposed

we who attended his early life
saw him grow up as we ourselves grew old
could have told you but will not, as per the dying wishes
of his older self, you see: It was a question he couldn’t answer himself. He said:

If I ever figure out, I will have no questions left
if I ever figure out, the distinction will lose significance, for, if one knows everything one knows every cause of every choice one makes, and every outcome. Don’t ever tell that child or anyone.

Don’t leave the nature of history on record within itself, he said,

and sat up, reached
with his functioning arm for a glass of wine. One of us provided. He said: I don’t know the exact time I will die, and after these many years can only cherish
that small uncertainty besides the larger, but if it’s not right now
my associates, let us at least enjoy the present night!