THE IDEA OF ETERNITY

We may not know when our lives are going to end, but we can be certain that we are always approaching that end. The lengthening contrail of yesterdays warns us that the invisible store of tomorrows is depleting. Underlining this knowledge is a Grand Narrative of our lives captured in the idea of an arc: a phase of growth, maturation, and augmentation followed, after an interval, by a time of shrinkage, and diminution; of progressive empowerment succeeded by disempowerment; of becoming and then begoing. Gain – of friends, loved ones, possessions, CV, standing – is followed by loss. Personhood, attachment, potency, value, and ultimately our individual being, are taken from us. Everything in which we have invested ourselves will disinvest in us. On the way, bereavements – of those whom we love or merely like, of past selves and their worlds, and of our faculties – remind us of the final state in which we shall be deprived of ourselves.

And so we need consolation. One version (and by no means the only one) of that consolation is the idea of the continuing existence of ourselves, and all that we truly love and value, in a realm somehow outside of that temporal world in which we gained and lost everything to which we were attached. That realm has many guises but the one that is most relevant to our present inquiry goes under the name of eternity. Dying, so the not entirely reassuring story goes, is to exchange life in time for life, or at least existence, in eternity.

If the idea of eternity is complex and contradictory, this is because the need for consolation, while it may be the main reason for its presence in our thought about the world and ourselves, is not the only force shaping how it has been conceived.