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XXII
Some Difficulties in Doing without Eternity
Have any of us noticed what a fairy-land we lost when we stopped believing in eternity? There was a glamour and a glitter about that past playground of religion which makes our present creed of science barren and chilly. If to-day we write the word Eternity in white chalk on a blackboard, and gazing at it try to recall what it used to signify, we shall find this exercise of the spirit most joyous. The word reminds us how we used to slip away from hurry to bathe in a sea of timelessness, refreshing to every taut nerve. How we exulted and expanded in the belief that eternity would give us all that we could not get in the present, for that was what eternity was for! We should never again be sick or sad or bad. In eternity we should be no longer the puny spawn of monkeys, but beings good and great and glorious as angels. Eternity was full of shining light and serried ranks of singing
Such was the fairyland of faith where once we walked confidently. It is banned now even from our fancy as irrevocably as the elf-kingdom of the nursery. No one now believes we live after we die; it is even deemed reprehensible to want to. Yet for those of us who formerly possessed eternity it is hard all at once to get used to doing without it. We agree with science that eternity should be abolished in the interests of an efficient spiritual life, and yet, without eternity, we sometimes ache with our abrupt adjustment to being merely mortal. Creeds and other comforts have a way of slipping away from us without our seeing. Time and again we can be found blindly struggling to adapt ourselves to some deficiency in our supply of beliefs without any clear conception of the nature of the hole or of our resources for either filling it or enduring it. The present age suffers all the awkwardness of being transitional. In a few decades babies will be born immune to any faith or fear in regard
The first difficulty of our adjustment has the nature of a growing-pain, being due to our still imperfect response to the commands of science, which bewilder our dullness by apparent contradiction. When science is all the time bidding us to batter down doors, it is confusing to the mind to have science herself declare that death is the only door that opens nowhere. In every other department of research we are encouraged to the wildest flights of imagination and hypothesis. It is, therefore, increasingly difficult, as we become increasingly inured to scientific adventure, to stop short before the most provocative of all phenomena, the human spirit in its eventful cycle. Eternity seems the only thoroughly scientific explanation of soul. At a mere superficial reading each human life appears like a chapter from a serial rather than a complete volume or a
It is even at times hard to withstand the conviction that there must be an author. One could almost suspect him of breaking off at a crisis on purpose to make us eager for the next installment. The figure of speech may perhaps make clear to us the primary trouble of our being transitional, namely, the difficulty of being both scientific and unscientific at the same time, for our instinct to understand and explain tends to destroy our pleasure even in the torn chapter we hold in hand; it is hard to work up a proper reading enthusiasm in the face of the positive assertion by science that there will be no "continued-in-our-next."
The most cursory study of our bygone belief reveals at once other troubles for the present generation in trying too suddenly to get along without a future. We suffer from the working within us of old instincts and
The first effect of destroying all these expectations is disastrous for people who were far more dependent on them than they dreamed, for, to tell the truth, eternity in the old days had so little apparent relation
Apart from our personal pangs, the loss of eternity has had effects, social and political, that intensify our private discomfort. Perhaps if our difficulties are clarified we may recognize how burdened we actually are, and be more willing to allow ourselves a makeshift leniency. Chief among the public phenomena directly traceable to the absence of eternity is the war. On a basis of strict mortality, war for aggrandizement becomes the only legitimate activity for person or nation. Reason shows that, since death ends all, material things are the only things worth getting, and even more clearly shows that, since human beings are as finite as mosquitoes, they are no more worthy of preservation. Germany is the most laudably logical nation in the world, but her logic has been a
Next to the war in importance of effect stands the high cost of living. Of course we all know that there is enough food for everybody to eat and enough money to pay for it, provided that nobody wants more food than he ought to eat, nor more money than he ought to spend. However, now that we know with absolute certainty that we die when we die, any man would be a fool if he did not try to eat as much and to spend as much as he possibly could. Food and money are the
Of causes of distress taken in order of popular complaint, next to war and the high cost of living stands the new poetry. The relation between imagism and immortality is so obvious as to be invisible. Granted that the aim of literature is to mirror life, the imagist insistence on aspect versus interpretation is inevitable, for plainly literature should not deal with meanings when life, being mortal, cannot have a meaning. Sensation alone is sufficiently ephemeral to be true to life, whereas a poem that attempts to express some significance beneath phenomena has a tendency to outlast its generation, and runs the risk of endurance, and of becoming, in some notable instances, even immortal, whereas such a reversion toward stability either in a poem or in a person shows each alike false to our faith in flux.
Those of us, however, who cannot all at once throw off the thrall of the poor old poets of our infancy must be content to go a bit slowly, trusting that our descendants will attain complete responsiveness to the poetry of the evanescent. We perceive humbly enough how reactionary we are, but our obstreperous instinct for explanation corrupts even our literary tenets so that with senile obstinacy we sometimes wonder whether, even from its own purely aesthetic point of view, the new poetry does not miss something the older poetry possessed. Meaning, adroitly introduced into a poem, sometimes produced a pretty little art of its own, a blending of outer and inner attributes that had in itself a kind of grace. It is even more heterodox to question, in looking back, whether a poet's effort to explain was not stimulating to his imagination, making him actually see things more vividly in their external aspects by his very concentration on their inner qualities. Certainly no imagist poet, for all his preoccupation with picture, has ever produced as vivid descriptions as did Browning, a poet above all others avid for meanings.
We of to-day may as well acknowledge first as last that our feet, set in infancy to
The spiritual leisure and lethargy resulting from a reliance on eternity to finish up what we could not get done on earth, obviously clogged the wheels of progress, which now can be everywhere seen whizzing along without any brakes. We open the advertising pages of any periodical, to find that speed is the dominant advantage offered with every commodity. Get-healthy-quick, get-learned-quick, get-rich-quick, are the headings under which most of our advertisements might be grouped. We are all familiar with the photographed faces of the people who will show us how to reach a maximum of attainment in a minimum of time. The gentleman with the
While haste is necessarily painful for our still imperfectly adjusted mentality in every department of life, we must allow for our being peculiarly sensitive to the changes it necessitates in the training of youth. In the old days when death graduated us into eternity, we had much more time to devote to education. There was in our early years an agreeable luxury in the pursuit of learning. We did not have to practice the rigid economy of the correspondence school or of languages by phonograph. As we look back, it seems as if minds were richer when they did not have to be so niggardly in the luggage they took for their journey. This is but the sentimental vaporing of the senile, for in our sane moments we perceive as clearly as does the most modern pedagogue that Greek and Latin are impedimenta to retard the boy of to-day in the race set before him, and we agree with the publisher-purveyors to youth that the compendia of useful knowledge furnished by them offer the handiest possible
As regards the study of the classics, we did not at first perceive that to annul the future involved annulling the past, and yet, practically, giving up eternity has undermined our interest in history. Conviction of mortality enjoins the conscience to concentrate on the contemporary so intensely that past events become obscure. Unless we have eternity before us we really have no time to look behind. Yet some of us have a yearning for history that used to find satisfaction in fancying that our little age fitted into a sequence of ages. It contributed to a false but agreeable complacency to gaze back into an endless past as it did to gaze forward into an endless future. Of course, abolishing eternity does not necessarily obliterate the past or explicitly forbid our going back there to visit; it merely makes to-day so important that we have no time whatever for yesterday.
In this matter of educational adjustment, as in others, a transitional period suffers enough to permit itself a little humoring of its prejudices; we should not attach too much guilt to a surreptitious enjoyment of the ancients so long as we do not corrupt the youth of our acquaintance by teaching them
Indisputably speed must be the desideratum of all activity, educational or other. Now the chief distress we older ones experience from speed is not that it leads to success, but that so often it leads nowhere. The old-fashioned custom of having a purpose in a pursuit makes it difficult for us to enjoy pure giddiness as heartily as do our younger contemporaries. Haste, first introduced as a method of extracting from the temporary what eternity used to supply, has become an end in itself, so that a great many people ask nothing else of life but to feel themselves whizzing. Since nothing is permanent except impermanence, the one thing to do is to go spinning along,
Now this heresy consists of the argument plainly approved by pure logic that if the purpose of speed is to get the most out of this life because there is no other, then no movement at all is exactly as rational as too much, and we have a perfect right to select any spot of our mental landscape that suits us and sit down on it, convinced that it is just as sensible to get our money's worth out of life's little day by being stationary as by being giddy. On the principle that ephemeral beings have a right to any fun they can find is founded the advice to our age toward which this entire discussion has been directed. Baldly stated, the proposal is this: the best way of doing without eternity is to pretend we don't have to! The suggestion is frankly so absurd that any reader is permitted to smile at it as freely as does the writer. We have lost eternity and we
The chief obstacle to the compromise is that its absurdity is exactly balanced by its efficacy; in other words, you can't tell how good it will feel until you try it, and if you are an over-rational and over-conscientious person you will think it beneath your dignity to try it. Yet actually there is nothing that contributes so much toward a sense of well-being as pretending, for a few minutes every day,—say just before getting up in the morning and just before going to sleep at night,—that you are going to live after you die.
After a few weeks of this exercise, that embarrassment we experience in the presence of nature becomes less painful, whereas, when we are too acutely conscious of mortality, we are shamed by an insensate oak, by a rock we could pound to powder for its silent sneer at our evanescence. If we make believe we are as good as they are, we can hold up our heads to the sky and the stars, and even venture to penetrate the social exclusiveness of the sky and the mountains. A man who pretends he is immortal is not so deafened by the cannon of the contemporary that he cannot hear the still, sweet voices of the little flowers. An association with the ancient aristocracy of sea and forest is good for a person, but it is almost impossible to feel at ease in this society unless we temporarily assume an equality with it in permanence.
This secret leniency toward our abandoned faith tends to enhance our joy in human comradeship as well as in that of nature. In actuality human affection is so menaced by fate as to resemble the surreptitious whispering in the schoolroom while the teacher's back is turned. When the loftiest spiritual converse may at any time be broken off by the malevolence of a molecule called a germ, some of us would rather never love anybody as the
A faith in a future secretly indulged is stimulating to mentality. If we assume for a few minutes even in jest that perhaps our life's chapter has a meaning, instantly our ingenuity is off to invent other chapters past and future. Before we know it our minds are glowing as we discover some passage of grand and sustained style, or are tingling with the glorious guesswork of an entire synopsis. If we are gifted with any dramatic instinct, we are as likely as not, while we turn the pages, to find ourselves appropriating the hero's part, and bearing ourselves a bit more nobly, with a dim notion of being destined to still greater actions in the next installment. Pretending that perhaps after all our life has a meaning makes us acquit ourselves rather better than we otherwise should in the tragic episodes, and makes us enjoy the comic scenes with a twinkle kindled at imperishable fires. Even hazarded surmises about the creatorship of our life's romance sometimes give a sense of
A little self-indulgence in eternity will not only enfranchise our conversation with our contemporaries and quicken our brains to decipher the book of humanity, but will tend to keep our minds, manners, and morals in trim for association with the great and good of all ages. We used to believe the halls of the dead were thronged with noble spirits toward whose wisdom and beauty our pilgrim feet would surely sometime find the way. This hope helped us to keep ourselves in order, much as the exiled Englishman restrains himself from slumping by donning his dress-suit in the jungle solitude. Of course, when evolution from the eternal to the ephemeral is fully accomplished, nobody will need any fillip to personal prestige, but for us poor intermediates, painfully hobbledehoy, it is a secret education in noble manners to pretend to ourselves that some day we shall be called upon to meet Socrates or Buddha or Christ.
Why not have a little patience with ourselves, we poor devils who have to bear all the brunt of the transition from eternity to evanescence? If we promise not to corrupt advancing youth, if we promise not even to corrupt our own reason by any genuine faith,
For, after all, what if there should be an Author?
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