All joy wants eternity … wants deep, deep eternity. With this
declaration of primordial lust, the patron saint of post-modernity exalts his
mania for joy, alongside the unquenchable thirst of the will to power, and,
with it, the futile quest for the super-human. The cultural force of this
dictum, which has become a commonplace among the literati, still drives the
onslaught of thought and behavior, even, and perhaps foremost, among those who
remain ignorant of its explicit pronouncement. A prophet is always heard most
widely and wrongly, not through his own voice, but through the discordant
voices of his wayward disciples. Amid the endless cacophony of copycats, who
vainly mimic the grand style of their master, you’re tempted to forget
the desperate loneliness of the solitary individual, a hermit in his many
hideaways and masks, who, above all else, sought to transmute his solitude
into a macho justification for human tenderness.
Late at night, when she is fast asleep, you crawl into bed; and in the midst
of the dark, quiet night, you hear rhythmic spasms in her breathing as she
dreams. Thoughtlessly, carelessly, inevitably, your mind empties itself so
that there is only the sound of her breathing – paradoxically steady and
spasmodic. In your own late-night, overwrought, careworn mania, you manage to
convince yourself that what you really hear at this moment is the sound of
eternity singing. Physiologically, you might interpret this as a mental
phantom concocted out of the stresses and strains of a tiring day. But this
illusion produces a reality that the mind cannot deny without destroying a
part of itself. Loving your mind too much to bear losing even its most
illusory fragments, you cannot help but think that these moments are gateways
to eternity, that they are not merely the pleasant afterimages you dream up to
forget a day of painstaking and tedious work but that they are indeed what you
have lived through the day to reach, to grasp and caress, if only for a
fleeting instant. Such moments (and not the jobs you do) are the serious work
of your life.
This book, the third and final one in the eternity trilogy, continues to
recount the conspiracy of nowhere and now here that unfolded in "The History
of Eternity" and "Passages to Eternity." Read this book, if you will, and
follow the adventures of this paradox as it reveals itself in the lives of 36
historical individuals, including Musil, Bloy, Peguy, George Eliot, Kripke,
Blake, Nishida Kitaro, Cather, Nagarjuna, Fitzgerald, Bruno, Paz, John Duns
Scotus, Mallarmé, Burke, Achebe, Murdoch, Epictetus, St. John of the
Cross, Turing, Lispector, Goya, Pirandello, Blanchot, Tennyson, Messiaen,
Cantor, O’Connor, Nin, Lowell, Racine, Vidal, Niebuhr, Twain, Derrida,
C.S. Lewis and many others.
