LeBron James’ final act is about more than basketball. It’s about time | Claire de Lune

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The most enormous celebrities, those larger-than-life characters with immense cultural impact, occupy a kind of hard-to-quantify space in the zeitgeist. They’re human, of course; that’s what makes them compelling. But they often come to represent something beyond themselves. In LeBron James’ case, for me, he’s become a measure of the passing of time. An aide-mémoire of my own mortality. Yes, his defiance of the aging process has been heartening proof that while Father Time comes for us all, the pace isn’t fixed. But the growing number of gray hairs in his beard, the players born after he was drafted who now meet him in transition, are persistent reminders that time…

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