Standing in the midst of an eternity

 THE LIVING PRESENT

When I returned to North America from my travels among traditional peoples in Indonesia and Nepal, I quickly found myself perplexed and confused by many aspects of my own culture. Assumptions that I had previously taken for granted, or that I had since childhood accepted as obvious and unshakable truths, now made little sense to me. The belief, for instance, in an autonomous “past” and “future.” Where were these invisible realms that had so much power over the lives of my family and friends? Everybody that I knew seemed to be expending a great deal of effort thinking about and trying to hold onto the past—obsessively photographing and videotaping events, and continually projecting and fretting about the future—ceaselessly sending out insurance premiums for their homes, for their cars, even for their own bodies. As a result of all these past and future concerns, everyone appeared (to me in my raw and newly returned state) to be strangely unaware of happenings unfolding all around them in the present. They seemed utterly oblivious to all those phenomena to which I had had to sensitize myself in order to communicate with indigenous magicians in the course of my fieldwork: the lives of other animals, the minute gestures of insects and plants, the speech of birds, the tastes in the wind, the flux of sounds and smells.… My family and my old friends all seemed so oblivious to the sensuous presence of the world. The present, for them, seemed nothing more than a point, an infinitesimal now separating “the past” from “the future.” And indeed, the more I entered into conversation with my family and friends, the more readily I, too, felt my consciousness cut off, as though by a sheet of reflective glass, from the life of the land.…

There is a useful exercise that I devised back then to keep myself from falling completely into the civilized oblivion of linear time. You are welcome to try it the next time you are out of doors. I locate myself in a relatively open space—a low hill is particularly good, or a wide field. I relax a bit, take a few breaths, gaze around. Then I close my eyes, and let myself begin to feel the whole bulk of my past—the whole mass of events leading up to this very moment. And I call into awareness, as well, my whole future—all those projects and possibilities that lie waiting to be realized. I imagine this past and this future as two vast balloons of time, separated from each other like the bulbs of an hourglass, yet linked together at the single moment where I stand pondering them. And then, very slowly, I allow both of these immense bulbs of time to begin leaking their substance into this minute moment between them, into the present. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, the present moment begins to grow. Nourished by the leakage from the past and the future, the present moment swells in proportion as those other dimensions shrink. Soon it is very large; and the past and future have dwindled down to mere knots on the edge of this huge expanse. At this point I let the past and the future dissolve entirely. And I open my eyes.…

I FIND MYSELF STANDING IN THE MIDST OF AN ETERNITY, A VAST and inexhaustible present. The whole world rests within itself—the trees at the field’s edge, the hum of crickets in the grass, cirrocumulus clouds rippling like waves across the sky, from horizon to horizon. In the distance I notice the curving dirt road and my rusty car parked at its edge—these, too, seem to have their place in this open moment of vision, this eternal present. And smells—the air is rich with faint whiffs from the forest, the heather, the soil underfoot—so many messages mingling between different elements in the encircling land. The jagged snag of a single withered oak tree standing alone in the field does not, in this eternity, seem really dead. It is surrounded by an admiring clump of low bushes, and a large boulder reposes at the edge of these bushes, dialoguing with the old tree about shadows and sunlight.

Stepping closer, I see that the crumbling bark around the oak’s trunk is crossed by two lines of ants, one moving up the trunk and the other heading down into the soil. From this closer vantage I see, too, that the shadows on the boulder are not really shadows at all, but patches of lichen spreading outward from various points on the rock’s surface, in diverse textures and hues—dull blacks and crinkly grays and powdery, deep reds—as though through them the rock was expressing its inner moods. I scratch my leg. Strangely, the vividness of this world does not dissipate. I stomp on the ground, spin around, even stand on my head. But the open present does not disperse. Several jet black crows race out of the woods, chasing each other in swoops and sudden dives; one of them lands on the crumbling snag. “Kahhr! … Kahr! Kahr!” Now it glides down to the ground just in front of me—“Kahr!”—and stands there looking at me, sideways, through a purple eye. The lids blink swiftly, like shutters. It hops around me and the big beak opens. “Kawhhr!” I try to reply, “Cawr!” and the bird steps forward. Crow does not hop, I see, but walks, clumsily, on this ground. I can see the tiny feathers covering the nostrils on its beak as the breeze picks it up off the ground, feel myself swoop through the swirling breeze toward the forest edge.…

Things are different in this world without “the past” and “the future,” my body quivering in this space like an animal. I know well that, in some time out of this time, I must return to my house and my books. But here, too, is home. For my body is at home, in this open present, with its mind. And this is no mere illusion, no hallucination, this eternity—there is something too persistent, too stable, too unshakable about this experience for it to be merely a mirage.…

THE UNSHAKABLE SOLIDITY OF THIS EXPERIENCE IS CURIOUS indeed. It seems to have something to do with the remarkable affinity between this temporal notion that we term “the present” and the spatial landscape in which we are embedded. When I allow the past and the future to dissolve, imaginatively, into the immediacy of the present moment, then the “present” itself expands to become an enveloping field of presence. And this presence, vibrant and alive, spontaneously assumes the precise shape and contour of the enveloping sensory landscape, as though this were its native shape! It is this remarkable fit between temporal concept (the “present”) and spatial percept (the enveloping presence of the land) that accounts, I believe, for the relatively stable and solid nature of this experience, and that prompts me to wonder whether “time” and “space” are really as distinct as I was taught to believe. There is no aspect of this realm that is strictly temporal—for it is composed of spatial things that have density and weight, and is spatially extended around me on all sides, from the near trees to the distant clouds. And yet there is no aspect, either, that is strictly spatial or static—for every perceivable being, from the stones to the breeze to my car in the distance, seems to vibrate with life and sensation. In this open present, I am unable to isolate space from time, or vice versa. I am immersed in the world.

(...)

It was only toward the end of his investigations regarding the phenomenology of “time consciousness” that Edmund Husserl was led to suggest that the experience of time is rooted in a deeper dimension of experience that is not, in itself, strictly temporal.28

Husserl’s assistant, the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, returned again and again to the analysis of temporal experience. In his massive and influential work Being and Time, Heidegger disclosed, underneath the commonplace Aristotelian idea of time as an infinite sequence of “now points,” a forgotten sense of time as the very mystery of Being, as that strange power—essentially resistant to all objectification or representation—that nevertheless structures and makes possible all our relations to each other and to the world. This mystery cannot be represented, precisely because it is never identical to itself; primordial time, for Heidegger, is from the first outside-of-itself, or “ecstatic.” Indeed, the past, the present, and the future are here described by Heidegger as the three “ecstasies” of time, the three ways in which the irreducible dynamism of existence opens us to what is outside ourselves, to that which is other.29Yet Heidegger gradually came to suspect that this implicit, preconceptual sense of time could not be held apart from our preconceptual experience of space. Hence, in an important essay written late in his career, Heidegger alludes to a still more primordial dimension, which he calls “time-space”—a realm neither wholly temporal nor wholly spatial, from whence “time” and “space” have been artificially derived by a process of abstraction.30

Meanwhile, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, continually deepening his own investigations of perceptual experience, also came, in his final work, to assert an experiential realm more originary than space and time, from which these two dimensions have been derived. In the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes of “this very time that is space, this very space that is time, which I will have rediscovered by my analysis of the visible and the flesh.”31 Yet this analysis was cut short by his sudden death in 1961.

So all three phenomenologists—Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—came independently, in the course of their separate investigations, to suspect that the conventional distinction between space and time was untenable from the standpoint of direct, preconceptual experience. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were both striving, toward the end of their lives, to articulate a more immediate modality of awareness, a more primordial dimension whose characteristics are neither strictly spatial nor strictly temporal, but are rather—somehow—both at once.

We have seen that such a mode of experience is commonplace for indigenous, oral peoples, for whom time and space have never been sundered. The tradition of phenomenology, it would seem, has been striving to recover such an experience from within literate awareness itself—straining to remember, in the very depths of reflective thought, the silent reciprocity wherein such reflection is born. No single one of these thinkers was entirely successful in reconciling time and space. Yet their later writings provide tantalizing clues, talismans for those who are struggling today to bring their minds and their bodies back together, and so to regain a full-blooded awareness of the present.

(...)

It is this strange asymmetry of past and future in relation to the present that Heidegger describes in his late essay “Time and Being.” While in Being and Time Heidegger wrote of the centrifugal, ecstatic character of time—of time as that which draws us outside of ourselves, opening us to what is other—in this later essay he stresses the centripetal, inward-extending nature of time, describing time as a mystery that continually approaches us from beyond, extending and offering the gift of presence while nevertheless withdrawing behind the event of this offering. Such descriptions may sound strange, even uncanny, to our ears, and yet we should listen to them closely. For as Heidegger’s thought matured, he increasingly sought to loosen human awareness from the bondage of outworn assumptions, precisely by wielding common words in highly unusual ways, shaking terms free from their conventional usages. Thus past and future are here articulated as hidden powers that approach us, offering and opening the present while nevertheless remaining withdrawn, concealed from the very present that they make possible. In Heidegger’s description, both the past and the future remain hidden from the open presence that they mutually bring about.39 And yet the way the future conceals itself in its offering is quite different from the manner in which the past is concealed in its giving. Specifically, the future, or that which is to come, withholds its presence, while the past, or that which has been, refuses its presence.40 The future withholds, while the past refuses. In his most complete description of the vicissitudes of time, Heidegger puts the matter thus:

What has been, which, by refusing the present, lets that become present which is no longer present; and the coming toward us of what is to come, which, by withholding the present, lets that be present which is not yet present—both [make] manifest the manner of an extending opening up which gives all presencing into the open.41

The strange character of Heidegger’s language here is part of his project: he is trying to avoid the use of nouns, of nominative forms that would freeze the temporal flux. It is precisely this strangeness that enables his words to approach, and to open us onto, the silent structuration of this mystery we call time. If we ponder these words from within the open presence of the land around us, we are led to ask: Where can we perceive this withholding and this refusal of which Heidegger speaks? Where can we glimpse this refusal and this withholding that open and make possible the sensuous presence of the world around us?

We have already noticed the magic by which the horizon encloses and yet holds open the visible landscape: precisely by concealing, or better, withholding, that which lies beyond it. Thus, the horizon may indeed be felt as a withholding. But it is hardly a refusal. The horizon’s lips of earth and sky may touch one another, but they are never sealed; and we know that if we journey toward that horizon, it will gradually disclose to us that which it now withholds.

Where, then, can we locate the refusal to which Heidegger alludes? Do we perceive such a refusal anywhere around us? More important: how do we even know what we are looking for? Here again, Heidegger provides a clue. In “Time and Being,” he writes of the past and of the future as absences that by their very absence concern us, and so make themselves felt within the present.42 This description aids us a great deal. Now at least we can say what we are searching for in our attempt to locate, or place, the past and the future. We are hunting for modes of absence which, by their very way of being absent, make themselves felt within the sensuous presence of the open landscape. Or in Merleau-Ponty’s terminology (the terminology of The Visible and the Invisible) we could say we are searching for certain invisible aspects of the visible environment, certain unseen regions whose very hiddenness somehow enables or makes possible the open visibility of the land around us. The beyond-the-horizon is just such an absent or unseen realm.

And so we must now ask: Is there another unseen aspect, another absent region whose very concealment is somehow necessary to the open presence of the landscape?

Of course, there are those facets that I cannot see of the things or bodies that surround me—the sides of the trees that are facing away from me, or the other side of that lichen-covered rock. Yet these concealments are all analogous, in a sense, to that which lies hidden beyond the horizon. The other side of that rock, for instance, is withheld from my gaze, but it is not refused, for I can disclose it by walking over there, just as I can disclose what lies beyond the horizon by making a longer journey.

What of my own body? Well, most of my body is present to my awareness, and visible to my gaze. I can see my limbs, my torso, and even my nose, although my back, of course, is hidden beyond the horizon of my shoulders. The back of my body is inaccessible to my vision, and yet I know that it exists, that it is visible to the crows perched behind me in the trees, as I know that the fields and forests hidden beyond the horizon are yet visible and present to those who dwell there.

Yet while pondering the unseen aspect of my body, I soon notice another unseen region: that of the whole inside of my body. The inside of my body is not, of course, entirely absent; but it is hidden from visibility in a manner very different from the concealment of my back, or of that which lies beyond the horizon. It is an instance, I suddenly realize, of a vast mode of absence or invisibility entirely proper to the present landscape—an absence I had almost entirely forgotten. It is the absence of what is under the ground.

(...)

MARTIN HEIDEGGER, WHOSE CAREFUL DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PAST and the future have helped us to recognize these realms as actual dimensions of the perceptual field, did not write of only two temporal dimensions, however, but of three, including that of the present. In Being and Time, Heidegger asserts that the present has its own ecstasy, its own proper transcendence, its own “ ‘whither’ to which one is carried away.”54 The implication is that phenomena can be hidden not just within the past or the future, but also within the very thickness of the present, itself—that there is an enigmatic, hidden dimension at the very heart of the sensible present, into which phenomena may withdraw and out of which they continually emerge. Thus in “Time and Being,” Heidegger writes that “even in the present itself, there always plays a kind of approach and bringing about, that is, a kind of presencing.”55 As though, paradoxically, there is a modality of absence entirely native to the present, out of which the present, itself, comes to presence: “In the present, too, presencing is given.”56Is there, then, yet another mode of absence or invisibility entirely endemic to the open landscape? I have already noticed, here within the perceivable present, the hidden nature of what lies behind the tree trunks and stones that surround me, which corresponds to the unseen character of that which lies on the other side of these nearby hills, and ultimately to those lands entirely beyond the horizon of the perceivable present, from whence numerous entities enter the visible terrain and into which various phenomena withdraw, recede, and finally vanish from view. I have acknowledged as well the concealed character of that which rests inside the trunks of these trees, inside the stones and the hills, which corresponds, ultimately, to the unseen nature of the under-the-ground, from whence beings sprout and unfurl, and into which they also crumble, decompose, and are submerged. Is there some other obvious style of absence, in the very thickness of the present, that is unique to itself, and not a mere modification of the under-the-ground or the beyond-the-horizon? Some mode of concealment that is, paradoxically, already out in the open, from whence the visible landscape itself continually comes to presence?

Perhaps I am pushing my method too far, here, in trying to place not only the withholding of presence by the future and the refusal of presence by the past, but also this concealment of presence from within the present itself. For now, more than ever, I feel confused,—unable to grasp, or to conceive of, what it is that I am searching for. Even as I gaze out across the wooded hills, my mind seems muddled by these questions, by ideas and associations that keep me from directly sensing and responding to the animate earth around me. I try to relax, and so begin to breathe more deeply, enjoying the coolness of the breeze as it floods in at my nostrils, feeling my chest and abdomen slowly expand and contract. My thinking begins to ease, the internal chatter gradually taking on the rhythm of the in-breath and the out-breath, the words themselves beginning to dissolve, flowing out with each exhalation to merge with the silent breathing of the land. The interior monologue dissipates, slowly, into the rustle of pine needles and the stately gait of the clouds.

A butterfly glides by, golden wings navigating delicate air currents with a few momentary flutters before they settle on a white flower. The seedstalks of the grasses bounce in the breeze, while clustered wildflowers tremble on their stems, awaiting the humming insects that motor haphazardly from one to the other. Fragrant whiffs from new blossoms in the overgrown orchard by the creek stir not only the winged beings, but my own flaring nostrils as they reach me from afar, drifting like spiderwebs on the faint winds. My sensing body now vividly awake to the world, I gradually become conscious of a third mode of invisibility, of an unseen dimension in which I am so thoroughly and deeply immersed that even now I can hardly bring it to full awareness.…

It is the invisibility of the air.

The Spell of the Sensuous

David Abram

Where is the past?

 As the man gazed off into space, the room he was in became ghostly and transparent, and in its place materialized a scene from the distant past. Suddenly he was in the courtyard of a palace, and before him was a young woman, olive-skinned and very pretty. He could see her gold jewelry around her neck, wrists, and ankles, her white translucent dress, and her black braided hair gathered regally under a high square-shaped tiara. As he looked at her, information about her life flooded his mind. He knew she was Egyptian, the daughter of a prince, but not a pharaoh. She was married. Her husband was slender and wore his hair in a multitude of small braids that fell down on both sides of his face.

The man could also fast-forward the scene, rushing through the events of the woman's life as if they were no more than a movie. He saw that she died in childbirth. He watched the lengthy and intricate steps of her embalming, her funeral procession, the rituals that accompanied her being placed in her sarcophagus, and when he finished, the images faded and the room once again came back into view.

The man's name was Stefan Ossowiecki, a Russian-born Pole and one of the century's most gifted clairvoyants, and the date was February 14,19S5. His vision of the past had been evoked when he handled a fragment of a petrified human foot

Ossowiecki proved so adept at psychometrizing artifacts that he eventually came to the attention of Stanislaw Poniatowski, a professor at the University of Warsaw and the most eminent ethnologist in Poland at the time. Poniatowski tested Ossowiecki with a variety of flints and other stone tools obtained from archaeological sites around the world. Most of these lithics, as they are called, were so nondescript that only a trained eye could tell they had been shaped by human hands. They were also precertified by experts so that Poniatowski knew their ages and historical origins, information he kept carefully concealed from Ossowiecki.

ft did not matter. Again and again Ossowiecki identified the objects correctly, describing their age, the culture that had produced them, and the geographical locations where they had been found. On several occasions the locations Ossowiecki cited disagreed with the information Poniatowski had written in his notes, but Poniatowski discovered that it was always his notes that were in error, not Ossowiecki's information.

Ossowiecki always worked the same. He would take the object in his hands and concentrate until the room before him, and even his own body, became shadowy and almost nonexistent. After this transition occurred, he would find himself looking at a three-dimensional movie of the past He could then go anywhere he wanted in the scene and see anything he chose. While he was gazing into the past, Ossowiecki even moved his eyes back and forth as if the things he was describing possessed an actual physical presence before him.

He could see the vegetation, the people, and the dwellings in which they lived. On one occasion, after handling a stone implement from the Magdalenian culture, a Stone Age people who flourished in France about 15,000 to 10,000 b.c, Ossowiecki told Poniatowski that Magdalenian women had very complex hair styles. At the time this seemed absurd, but subsequent discoveries of statues of Magdalenian women with ornate coiffures proved Ossowiecki right

Over the course of the experiments Ossowiecki offered over one hundred such pieces of information, details about the past that at first seemed inaccurate, but later proved correct He said that Stone Age peoples used oil lamps and was vindicated when excavations in Dordogne, France, uncovered oils lamps of the exact size and style he described. He made detailed drawings of the animals various peoples hunted, the style of the huts in which they lived, and their burial customs—assertions that were all later confirmed by archaeological discoveries.1

Poniatowski's work with Ossowiecki is not unique. Norman Emerson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and founding vice president of the Canadian Archaeological Association, has also investigated the use of clairvoyants in archaeological work. Emerson's research has centered around a truck driver named George McMullen. Like Ossowiecki, McMullen has the ability to psychometrize objects and use them to tune into scenes from the past. McMullen can also tune into the past simply by visiting an archaeological site. Once there, he paces back and forth until he gets his bearings. Then he begins to describe the people and culture that once flourished at the site. On one such occasion Emerson watched as McMullen bounded over a patch of bare ground, pacing out what he said was the location of an Iroquois longhouse. Emerson marked the area with survey pegs and six months later uncovered the ancient structure exactly where McMullen said it would be.2Although Emerson began as a skeptic, his work with McMullen has made him a believer. In 1973, at an annual conference of Canada's leading archaeologists, he stated, “It is my conviction that I have received knowledge about archaeological artifacts and archaeological sites from a psychic informant who relates this information to me without any evidence of the conscious use of reasoning.” He concluded his talk by saying that he felt McMullen's demonstrations opened “a whole new vista” in archaeology, and research into the further use of psychics in archaeological investigations should be given “first priority.”3

Indeed, retrocognition, or the ability of certain individuals to shift the focus of their attention and literally gaze back into the past, has been confirmed repeatedly by researchers. In a series of experiments conducted in the 1960s, W. H. C. Tenhaeff, the director of the Parapsychological Institute of the State University of Utrecht, and Marius Valkhoff, dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Witwatersfand, Johannesburg, South Africa, found that the great Dutch psychic, Gerard Croiset could psychometrize even the smallest fragment of bone and accurately describe its past.4 Dr. Lawrence LeShan, a New York clinical psychologist, and another skeptic-turned-believer, has conducted similar experiments with the noted American psychic, Eileen Garrett.5 At the 1961 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, archaeologist Clarence W. Weiant revealed that he would not have made his famous Tres Zapotes discovery, universally considered to be one of the most important Middle American archaeological finds ever made, were it not for the assistance of a psychic.6

Stephan A. Schwartz, a former editorial staff member of National Geographic magazine and a member of MIT's Secretary of Defense Discussion Group on Innovation, Technology, and Society, believes that retrocognition is not only real, but will eventually precipitate a shift in scientific reality as profound as the shifts that followed the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin. Schwartz feels so strongly about the subject that he has written a comprehensive history of the partnership between clairvoyants and archaeologists entitled The Secret Vaults of Time. “For three-quarters of a century psychic archaeology has been a reality,” says Schwartz. “This new approach has done much to demonstrate that the time and space framework so crucial to the Grand Material world-view is by no means as absolute a construct as most scientists believe.”7

THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE

MICHAEL TALBOT

Space and time are the great subjective mistakes which we all agree in making and on and in which we build all our disagreements

Attached to Timeless everlasting NOW or beyond assumption that one has duration→

There is an inherent special ambiguity about the “present” as an idea or as an existent, which it does not seem to share with the past or the future. Some argue that the present has no duration, being simply a surface between past and future, while others talk of its duration though they can’t agree on what length it ought to have and take specious refuge in a “spacious present.” Without paying particular attention to these two views, I find the mere fact that they are asserted indicates that the notion is elastic in the minds of other people and so too I find it in my own. Also the “present” seems to me equally admissible both for “what I am doing now” (extended) and for “what is present to me now” (instantaneous). And the first (subjective) may be the “shortest thought flash conceivable” or “my whole life I am living” or “eternity of past and future in the now. In the last (objective), all temporalization, in its three “orthogonal dimensions” of past, future and present, “appear present” as follows: the past was (present), the present is (present), the future will be (present), and (this is an important point) all three together eternally may be.

Again concern with the past (taken as probable) gives us historians (and Hegel), concern with the future (taken as possible) gives us scientists, politicians and astrologers (and Hegel), concern with the past and future gives us logicians (and Hegel). The Buddha recommends concern with the present in the Bhaddekaratta-sutta, and this is only possible by introspection which reveals the ambiguity, absurdity and contingency of eternity in time. Again, perhaps, the past is the legitimate field of knowledge (which comprehends), the future is the legitimate field of faith (faith being ignorant man’s instrument for groping beyond where knowledge extends). The present is the legitimate field for describing, in terms of the three times, and for remembering what one has described.

**
Such faith (of stream enterer) decides in advance that nothing arisen can reveal any permanence at all, however brief. Since all subsequent evidence supports the decision, if that evidence is not forgotten, craving is progressively stultified in the impossibility of finding any arisen thing worth craving for, and is progressively displaced by the joy of liberation. The first problem, though, that of time, is properly a matter for insight (vipassanā) and can only be dealt with here by hints and pointers because of lack of space. (...)

To question the objectivity of time is not new even to Western philosophy. While objective reality of time and space still remains one of the assumptions made by scientists for which they have no proof, Immanuel Kant argued irrefutably for the pure subjectivity of both. But almost a millennium and a half before him, Ācariya Buddhaghosa wrote, “What is called ‘time’ is conceived in terms of such and such dhammas … But that [time] should be understood as only a mere conceptual description, since it is non-existent as to any individual essence of its own.” (Atthasālinī. Space is analogously treated elsewhere). A century or two later it was observed that “Nibbāna [extinction] is not like other dhammas. In fact because of its extreme profundity it cannot be made the object of consciousness by one who has not yet reached it. That is why it has to be reached by change-of-lineage cognizance [gotrabhū], which has profundity surpassing the three periods of time” (Mūlaṭīkā).
**

The struggle with time

What is most essential in us struggles with time. It is impossible to not accept space; it is too great a piece of evidence. But there is a moment from which you don’t want to accept time. The dramatic moment of the individual existence culminates always in the struggle with time. This struggle, however, is without escape, because the being touched by temporality, once having conquered eternity, inevitably regrets time. The desire to flee from time is found only in people ill with time, people who are tied too strongly by the bonds of fleeting moments. Redemption is such an inconsistent aspiration because of the regret experienced by those who are after the joys, surprises, and tragedies that the world, which lives and dies in the meanwhile, has to
offer. If there is a temporal pressure, there is also, none the smaller, an infinity pressure.

Man aspires to infinity, but loves time more. As this life that we live and consume is the only value that we are given, it is impossible not to conceive of eternity as a loss, which we nonetheless respect. The only thing one can love is life itself, which I detest. It is absolutely impossible to get rid of time, without getting rid of life at the same time. Wherever you position yourself, time is the biggest temptation: a greater temptation than life itself, because if death is not in time, then time will become the occasion of death. This is why the pure ecstasy of time reveals to us such bizarre mysteries and it introduces us to the secrets that bind the two worlds.

When man wouldn’t know the access to eternity through absolute living in the moment, when he wouldn’t be able to leap through eternity already living in the temporal whirlpool and would be forced to choose one of the two for eternity, would he then not hesitate to prefer time? Or when, also for ever, he would have to choose
between Cleopatra and Saint Therese, would he hide his predilection for the first?

The book of delusions
translation: Camelia Elias