VIII

"Eternity is in love with the creations of time" - William Blake

There are some eternal things: mathematical truths, for example.  There is a sense in which objective events seem to be eternal: Abraham Lincoln will always have been assassinated in 1865, but if all men forget this, the mode of existence of this fact seems at best a bit arcane and ghostly, if it would exist at all then.  A legend, by contrast, or a song-- an artifact of history which is remembered and rehearsed in the minds of the living, embedded in culture and in consciousness-- certainly has a more robust existence, but can it become one of the eternal things?  I have sometimes heard a song and felt it to be a discovery rather than a composition; as if, had the song not been written, it ought to be written; that the song was necessary.  In a mystery, this is both an illusion and a truth.  The circumstances that gave rise to the song were historically contingent.  But some songs, some stories, become so much a part of us that to deprive us of them would make it impossible for us to think as we do, to be who we are.  They have become, for us at least, a part of the eternal things, which, if our souls are immortal, and if they are not destined to be degraded and denatured, will always live on in us.

Eternity: God, but also the life of the mind if one believes in immortality of the soul; the thought-realm, forever humming, not only with plans and impressions but also with echoes, with memories, during an intensive infinity of moments which-- for why should I believe it ends with the body? certainly not on the basis of either deductive or inductive reasoning!-- stretches out into an extensive infinity of (subjective) time, for good or ill.  Is in love with: admires, dwells upon, exalts, shrouds in a web of dreams, regards as an ideal, praises, draws inspiration from, worships.  The productions of time: people, places, choices, events, in particular as these are woven into stories.

Which raises the question: can we become a part of the eternal things?  I am not writing, or not writing chiefly, of worldly fame.  A great geometer's name may be attached to a theorem which generation after generation of schoolboys is required to scribble about, without that geometer ever contributing to the essence of any human soul.  Rather, I am thinking of how the personality of a friend may imprint itself on my mind such that he may become forever a part of my moral vocabulary, so that in my best moments I always think, among other things, of what he would do.  If we can be such friends to men, then we will please God, or, in other words, "eternity [will be] in love with [us,] the productions of time."

https://freethinker.typepad.com/the_free_thinker/2008/01/eternity-is-in.html

=/

NeD

Popular tracks