Easter Essay: From ‘Beyond Consolation’

A meditation on the 'known unknowns' we detect through longing, hope, memory, and Time, from my 2010 book, 'Beyond Consolation'. The Christ lives with us!

We Shall Have Stars at Elbow and Foot

I had an epiphany not long ago in a Texaco station on the N4 near Lucan, on the road westwards out of Dublin. I had fallen into the habit of stopping there whenever I drove west, for a fill-up and a takeaway coffee, finding few things in Irish life as exhilarating as driving West out of the dawn, with no company but Bob Dylan and a hot skinny latte. Then, one Sunday morning, I encountered an ‘Out of order’ notice on the coffee machine and a truckdriver manfully making himself a cuppa from a jar of Nescafe Gold. I was devastated. I don’t mean I was a little annoyed: I was beside myself with disbelief and disappointment.

By the time I hit Newtownforbes, about halfway to my destination, it had begun to occur to me that this was a disproportionate response to the temporary unavailability of coffee-coloured milk. That’s when I decided I should see how life felt without it. It was, you might say, a modest sacrifice arising out of a minor hedonism, but dimly perceiving that this seemed to  be about something fundamental, I decided to give up coffee for Lent. 

I hadn’t ‘done’ Lent since childhood. As a little boy, Lent had been for me emblematic of an experience of Christianity seemingly fixated on pointless self-denial, as though the very pleasures of life were themselves suspect, as though we had been let loose in a garden booby-trapped with temptations designed to test our capacities for some ethic of restraint whose objective claim to virtue was never satisfactorily explained. Reacting against a childhood tendency to go unthinkingly along with this, I later on began to see Lent as a time to indulge myself in doing and consuming things I wouldn’t normally be bothered with, by way of elaborately repudiating the tyranny of imposed self-denial. I would eat fish any day except Friday and give up blueberry muffins as soon as Easter was over. Childish, I know, but there it is. 

Alcohol had been for me an adventure embraced largely because it seemed to be disapproved of. The results were both disastrous and eye-opening as to the validity of at least some of the cautionary messages in the form of preachings and prohibitions, directed at my growing-up self. But this did not, of course, mean that this experience educated me in the underlying context or meaning of these patterns, nor did the salutary lesson concerning alcohol translate into a general theory of freedom in reality.

At the level of collective culture, our societies misunderstand addiction, thinking usually of chemical dependency and outright junkie disintegration. But addiction is a much more subtle and ubiquitous phenomenon, having as its principal symptom the evasion of reality. It’s not just the chemicals: sometimes it’s the distraction, the comfort, the habit or the sweetness, and always the blocking out of the real. Things we tend to think of as making us free are often the sources of our enslavement.

Sometimes it is good to contemplate that letting go of things we think essential may not cause as much pain as we imagine. Self-denial is not always a penance: sometimes it can become an exercise in self-liberation.

My coffee experiment was an instructive experience. Over the next couple of weeks, although I encountered no obvious symptoms of withdrawal that might readily be attributable to my ‘penance’, I began to note something deeper in myself that I had no doubt was connected to my abstinence. I don’t actually like coffee that much, my addiction in this instance being more in the nature of circumstantial ritual: buying the beverage in the crowded filling station, putting on one of my favourite CDs and sipping it as the countryside of the midlands opens up before me. In these moments, it is as if Freud’s policeman takes a break from sitting on my shoulder and instead sits in the seat beside me and starts telling me that he, too, enjoys a little Bob Dylan, that that song on the CD player, ‘Mama, You Been On My Mind’, makes him think that Dylan seemed to have the capacity to watch his own intelligence at work from a distance, observe the calculated duplicity of his own thought and get it all down in a couple of lines. Maybe it’s the colour of the sun cut flat/And coverin’ the crossroads I’m standin’ at/Or maybe it’s the weather or somethin’ like that/But Mama, you been on my mind.

On a surface level, being off coffee didn’t affect me. There’s almost no coffee in a latte anyway. When I made a journey as before and had a cup of tea instead of a latte, it didn’t seem to make much difference. But, then, one morning when I woke up, I noticed that I had just the tiniest bit less than usual of an urge to get out of bed. I got up. I watched myself and waited. The next day, I felt the same thing. After a few days, I realised that what I was experiencing was that my sense of the balance of meaning in reality had been ever-so-slightly affected by my removal of this single, tiny pleasure from my life. I had lost a little of the moment-to-moment hope that suggested life as being worth living.

Have you ever stopped what you are doing to enter fully into the present moment, to look at it and compare it with other reference points you might be dimly relating to, in the past or the future? Have you ever stopped and asked: what is the nature of my reality, what defines it, how might I describe it? When I do this, from time to time, I become conscious of a strange and unsettling fact of my ordinary existence: that it is, as Pope Benedict has intimated, fundamentally disappointing. When I look, briefly, over my shoulder, I become conscious of some of the forces that drove me to this point, and that seemed, while doing so, to be whispering to me that I was going somewhere special. And yet, when I gather myself up in the present, I invariably find that where I thought I was going, in as far as it was a thought at all, is not where I am now. I have not yet arrived at the promised place.

And then, entering further into myself, I become aware that the desires are still there, driving me forward, promising me something, cajoling me to go on. If I were to become strictly logical, I might decide that it is all a sham, knowing that, when next I pause in this manner to reflect, I will find myself in the same place, still looking over my shoulder at the desires that drive me ever onward, still aware of something propelling me forward, but still, too, in the same condition I find myself enveloped in here, now.

There is, I recognise, a hope inside me that is bigger than I am, that overwhelms me with confidence and optimism and that rests too in the light that it has placed just beyond my sight, a light that I see only in a reflection on the telegraph wires overhead, a faint shimmer of something engaging, promising, comforting or seductive. My desire still tells me that something is coming, something is happening, something is waiting for me just as I am waiting for it. But nothing on earth has come near to satisfying this desire.

With pleasure, beauty and happiness there always comes regret, because of the sense that what is being experienced is really just a sign for something behind it, something unreachable. I find myself in a moment of tranquillity, perhaps on a Sunday morning in April walking by the forest beside Annaghmakerrig lake, in the grounds of the Tyrone Guthrie Writers and Artists Centre in County Monaghan, where I am writing parts of this book, first hearing voices and then catching a glimpse of a father and his two little daughters among the trees. I have been happily strolling along, enjoying the sunshine and the racket of the hedgerows, when suddenly something happens to discommode me. I am overcome by a lurching sadness, which I find impossible to pick up and look at.

It may, I think, have to do with the years of my own daughter’s childhood, in which we had mornings like this, perhaps in Hyde Park in London or on the beach at Lislary in Sligo. Partly, I guess, what I feel is regret that these moments are past, these particular moments, I mean, since it is still possible for me to take my now teenage daughter to all these places and others as well. Perhaps there is a streak of envy because this man has his children with him now, whereas I am preoccupied with the business of making black marks on white pieces of paper. But there is something else as well, a feeling that the beauty I crave within me is not entirely here, even in this near blissful moment, a feeling that we are all scratching at the face of beauty, seeking to enter, all trapped outside something we can sometimes glimpse or smell or hear, but cannot enter in the way the urging inside us tells us should be possible. This beauty that we sense will move on, or wither or dissove or leave without us reaching it. And in this moment, too, I already detect another feeling: of disquiet on account of the hovering thought that I would prefer if this idyllic tableau, this appealing vista, could go away and resolve to return another time, when I shall be more prepared to experience and enjoy it without turbulence or perturbation.

Sometimes, sitting working inside my attic window in Dalkey, I glance upwards and am swept away by something that has manifested for what I am certain will be a brief and once-only performance. I look east and see that, in the murk of the low-slung cloud, an oasis of sunlight has appeared, trapped in a clearly defined area between the Great South Wall and the coastline beyond, which is probably Clontarf (although my grasp of the geography of the north side of Dublin is still, after twenty-five years in the capital, a little ropey). There is an intensity of brightness to the sunlight that seems impossible, perhaps the contrast with the gloom over the rest of Dubln Bay. It is as if it has erupted spontaneously in the space allotted to it, like a visitation of light from another place, with no visible evidence of source. I stare at it in wonder, delighting in the idea that I could be blessed to witness it, a little dismayed that there is nobody in the house right now with whom to share it, and at the same moment consumed by a sudden tremor of sadness. I have taught myself to remain in such moments and look at the sadness.

What is it? It has a little to do with the pre-programme that sends out signals every moment of my waking life, impelling me hither and thither in search of perfection. The sudden rush of beauty makes me regret that my perfect life has not yet come together. I stay with it and look hard into the feeling. I see, or hear, something else: this beauty that will pass. This beauty that will be here when I am not. This moment that may well recur, perhaps a billion times on the road to infinity, but I shall not be here to see it.

Deep inside I feel something else, like a ball of frustration that has nothing to do with sadness as I normally understand it. It is like I can’t quite get to something. Do I want to reach out and touch this moment, to snatch it to myself and store it away? There is a little of this. I look again at the shining wash of light on the fortunate bay and think I feel something greater than possessiveness: perhaps a yearning for something that is not quite there, a barely-awake sense that this sight before me is something I almost know, only not quite anything I know and not quite the whole of what I feel.

Then it strikes me: I have been expecting this. I have known about this, or something like it — and, now its picture has materialised before me, I am on the hazard for something else to happen. Except that it doesn’t happen. I seem to remember seeing something a little like this before, except something far more beautiful, something perfect or at least closer to perfection than this, and this feeling is accompanied by the recalled sense of this something, or Something, having been at the time accompanied by an understanding, or an event, or a state of consciousness, that is absent from the present picture. But the strangest thing, then, is to somehow hold that feeling and look at it as into the eyes of a beloved, and realise that it contains all these elements: the regret of not being able to share this moment with someone who will affirm it and spread the risk of it being lost forever; the fear  that this will be the only and final occasion on which I will witness this precise manifestation of beauty; and the deeper sense that even this intensity is just an echo of something, that it is really no more than a crude representation of something already seen, or known, or distilled and implanted in my heart as pure and limitless desire.

To comprehend the experience in this multiple manner is to achieve something not unlike the process of learning to swim or ride a bicycle. When you have done something like this a couple of times, it ceases to frighten and starts to exhilarate. You become proficient in the process of  entering into the totality of what is in front of you. The epiphany of beauty followed by the sudden lurch of sadness ceases to be the conclusion. I refuse to scrunch myself up in fear of what I might discover. If I stay with it a little longer it turns again, and becomes a sweetness, a peaceful but ineffable understanding that, yes, this beauty is not the end of itself, but merely a hint of something beyond or behind — something I have been awaiting in some way for some time — and that my witnessing it now is not a meaningless happenstance but more in the way of momentarily catching sight of a slipped mask on the world behind. It seems obvious that such moments are striking because they are exceptional. They don’t happen often, but still often enough to repudiate the idea that beauty is either something accidental or something perverse and teasing. Conventional wisdom and everyday experience dictate that, though beauty exists, it is not available in this dimension all the time. But these moments tell me something else: that beauty is the norm, that the pain and sadness or sometime ugliness of this dimension are nothing like the truth of reality. Somewhere out there is the true echo of the desire I feel.

As you grow older, life sends little messages, sometimes with the most unlikely messengers, to tell you that you’ve been getting it all wrong. Such moments occur to tell me that, although the sense of perfection that governs me is not realisable in this dimension, this does not mean it is not real. Perfection exists, even if it can’t be found right now. The rain falling on my face tells me it’s okay. Breathe and be. Even after the loss of love, love remains. Nothing can be lost because nothing is quite here yet, just the shadows of things and the echo of the future sneaking in.

Father Luigi Giussani, in a talk entitled ‘The Risen Christ, the Defeat of Nothingness’, said: ‘All things have a vanishing point toward the infinite, the eternal, and that is what attracts us, because it is according to the measure of the heart.’ This ‘vanishing point’ is the aperture opening into the mystery. This, in the shape of a mountain or the face of a beautiful woman, or indeed man, is what attracts the eye. It is possible, of course, to look upon such things without knowing this, and still be moved, carried away. But to look upon things all the time without understanding this is to move, slowly but inexorably, towards disappointment. One day, even in the midst of beauty that once transported me, I will, without this insight, be struck down by loneliness and tedium and a desire to be someplace else. I will be forced to conclude that either life has no point or I am missing it. These moments do occur, and in doing so present a challenge and a choice: either I succumb to their implicit despair or I move through them, focusing on the hard facts of reality — first gazing, then moving through what it there to what is beyond. In a step or two I have shaken the weight of unhope from my shoulders and moved towards the future.

After years of observation of myself and others, it occurs to me that there is something counter-intuitive about the human engagement with reality. Much of the modern self-help philosophy urges man to ‘live in the moment’, but in truth this is impossible. The moment does not stand still for me to live in it. It passes and another arrives, but this too is gone before I can engage it. In his sublime essay ‘The Dimension of the Present Moment’, the scientist, philosopher and poet Miroslav Holub observes that comprehending eternity is easier than comprehending the present moment, which is ‘a dimension without a dimension’. But Holub insists that what he calls ‘the subjective present’ can, in fact, be defined. Describing various experiments concerning the human capacity to recall, exactly or otherwise, the content of very short sounds, he concludes that the present moment, perhaps of slightly different duration for everyone, lasts approximately three seconds, just enough time for a ‘tick’ and a ‘tock’, denoting the unit, perhaps the temporal quark of human perception. Even this quasi-satirical exercise in empiricism merely serves to accentuate the transient nature of the human gaze, the difficulty in being able to look at reality for long enough to say what the real is like as it happens.

What requires to be entered, then, is not the present moment, but something beyond it, not in the future or the sky, but a point related to the present moment by a measurement that is not of this dimension. A crude metaphor is provided by the golfer’s method of addressing the ball. There is the matter of the proper stance, or demeanour, but also there is the question of how the ball is addressed. When the club strikes the ball, the golfer is not focused on the point of contact, but on a point through and beyond the ball, where the head of his club should rightly end up. The club strikes the ball, which is dispatched into its trajectory; but the club follows through to the position the golfer was seeking to achieve in his stroke. The optimum result is achieved by focusing not on the present moment but ever so slightly into the future. The point is to hit the ball correctly, but the point can also be defined as the necessity of ending up in the correct posture, which seems to have nothing at all to do with the ball, long gone when the end position is achieved. The correct focus of man’s sense of meaning resides at least marginally ahead of him, and his destination ideally an absolute distance in front of him. The meaning of what he does here, now, is enhanced by adopting a posture predicated on those other points, rendering him in harmony with the earthly and transcendent realities at once.

The genius of Luigi Giussani related not so much to his startling re-presentation of the Christian proposal as to his understanding of what had been happening at the heart of the culture of modern society. He seemed, a half century ago now, to see things that were only just beginning to show their earliest signs. Giussani stared at what was happening until it began to yield up its patterns. He observed that human curiosity seemed to have lost any intrinsic capacity for positive affirmation, its sympathy with being. Man’s curiosity had become detached from the fundamental longing that underpins the human appetites, so that he no longer felt pushed towards a universal comparison between himself and what he encountered beyond himself.  Instead he was focused on his desires in something approximating to the present, in the banality of the here-and-now. Giussani recognised this condition as fatal to man. And, having observed, Giussani prepared an antidote comprising both his re-presentation of the Christian proposal and a new way of explaining modern man to himself. Eliding the traps of language, he created a new description of man’s condition and his alienation from his true nature.

The antidote was Christ, yes, but in a particular way, a way that opens up again the circuitry of man’s total relationship with reality, by reawakening in him that Christ was still here, walking by his side on the road.

In the past few years, as a result of stumbling over the work and story of Don Giussani, I have been thrown in the path of many people I would not otherwise have met. It is hard to say what these people are like. It is easier to get across what they possess to render them different by noting how other people seem to lack this essence. There is no sense of evangelical zeal, but rather an intensity of ease that seems to seek nothing but the happiness of the other. They look at me in a different way, as though they can see me always in my timeless, spaceless dimension. There is a sense that the people I have met in Communion and Liberation (the movement established by Giussani to pursue his intuition about Christianity in modern culture) have integrated themselves into reality in a different way, having stretched themselves again between the stars and the earth’s core, floating in an infinity of time. Each new moment arrives to them not as an ephemeron but as a revelation, an event relating to the total potential meaning of their existence. They have no need to capture or measure it, their gazes being always directed slightly beyond it to what is not quite here yet. Every little thing gives them a greater sense of who they are and why they are here. They are filled with a wonder that is infectious. I have encountered nothing like it anywhere else.

In my experience of living in the culture I have inhabited for over fifty years, there is a moment somewhere not far beyond the middle of life when something fundamental changes about your understanding of life and its meaning. I don’t mean a rational apprehension, a penny dropping, a new level of understanding suddenly arriving. In fact, this moment does not announce itself at the time, but only in retrospect, gradually revealing itself as having begun to occur at some critical moment beyond the halfway of life’s expectancy, perhaps a fortieth or fiftieth birthday, the death of a parent, or the birth of a child. This moment is not a revelation, but more like a chill that creeps into your bones, an understanding that everything you have been working with as a map of reality has been bogus. I sometimes think this may be what the medical profession has been misnaming as ‘depression’, though I have no wish to prove this theory even to myself.

It has, I think, something to do with repetition, with the idea of doing the same thing over and over while each time expecting something new or unexpected to occur. This impulse drives us through much difficulty in life, despite the disprovable insistence of the culture that there is something meaningful in the next experience, that a purer form of happiness is just around the corner. At a certain moment in your life, you rumble this idea and, drawing in the totality of your experience, begin to comprehend that, if you continue to see things in the same old way, what will happen in the future is pretty much, in essence, what has happened in the past, and, at a certain point, this will no longer contain the illusory promise it has held heretofore. The specifics of your experiences may change, but the outcome, measured in happiness and satisfaction, will become reduced.

Another thing I notice as I grow older is that something odd is happening to my sense of time. When I reflect back on a particular past moment, some intense three seconds of joy or peace, I am surprised by how recent it seems. Once, time seemed to open up before and behind me in a linear fashion, reliably measurable by some approximate process of comparison; now, it seems to have become more fluid, shifting, no longer near-and-distant, but encroachingly all of a piece.

Gradually I began to perceive that my vantage-point in reality was no longer on an axis extending backwards and forwards, but at the centre of a not-quite completed circle. One consequence of this was that I was no longer able reliably to measure the emotional distance to some future moment by comparing it with distance into past time. Whenever I tried to do this, my sense of time seemed to become mangled and confused. Time seemed to have changed form and started attempting to surround me, rather than extending itself before and behind. An event that had occurred six months before might seem like either three days or 30 years in the past. When I found myself in a place I had been to some time before, the sense of that past time would overcome me as though it were only moments, rather than 30 or 35 years, before. I would be in Galway, in Eyre Square, where I worked in 1978, and, though the place had changed a little, feel a kind of continuity with the person I had been back then, even though the intervening period had spanned many years when I had barely thought of that experience at all. My childhood and adult selves are blurring into one, my whole life converging as though towards a single moment. It is as though my life has risen up before and behind me, like the Milky Way. Already, as Dylan Thomas promised, I found myself with stars at elbow and foot.

When I turned 50, I now realise, something began to happen to me that, though unrelated to any physical change, was having a palpable effect on my sense of myself. I was breathing in from the surrounding culture a new message about my evolving description. Birthdays affect everybody differently and you can almost never tell someone’s attitude to his age by simply asking him about it. It is possible that he has convinced himself of what he tells you, that it doesn’t matter, that he hardly ever thinks about it, that we’re counting from the wrong end, ahaha, ahahahaha.

It is not that, when I passed my fiftieth birthday, I suddenly noticed a change. But, although the implications of what was happening did not sink in for a long time afterwards, I can trace a fundamental shift in my relationship with my life to that exact moment. Deeper down there was a process, of which I was only vaguely aware in my emotions, and not at all in my head, of a kind of disquietude developing within me. I found myself, accidentally hearing radio adverts directed at the over-50s, and wanting to hide away. Although I am generally open about my age, there is, I recognise, a certain implicit and paradoxical reluctance in my too-emphatic declaration of my truthful age. I blurt it out almost by way of implying that it doesn’t matter, or that it isn’t what it seems to be, or that I am above and beyond all that nonsense. And yet, if you were to ask me, having just heard an advert for ‘vitamins for the over-fifties,’ I would probably deny my age until the cock crowed. For someone of my generation to be 50 seems beyond impossible, because we have been trapped in a bubble of cultural certainty that reassured us we would always be young. There is therefore for us a certain dreamlike quality to the process of ageing. Whether we try to deny the truth or admit to it, either way we do not quite believe it. We are always on the verge of asking for a recount.

In our societies, age, after sex and colour, is perhaps the most fundamental element of human identity. Each of us, consciously or not, factors in, as part of his apprehension of his fellows, an instant computation of chronological age. And yet, each of us also, within him- or herself, does constant battle with his own indicator. We lie about it to the world and fudge it to ourselves.

There is a melancholia, too, that seeks to descend on me as I grow older. It is a strange mixture of an attraction to the beauty of the world, growing in inverse proportion to my sense of the putative time that remains to me, and a consequent fear of the certainty of eventually losing this forever. There is a kind of weight that descends, like rain-bearing cloud. It seems to consist mainly of fear, but it is not fear of death, or at least not obviously so. It is, instead, a fear of smaller things, a fear that very often cannot be traced to anything in particular.

If I stand back from it and try to document what it comprises, I find myself zeroing in on the oddest of phenomena: the pile of undealt with correspondence on the top of my microwave oven, unpaid bills and unsorted documents, most of which I could simply throw away; the ironing board buried in crumpled garments that accuses me every time I enter the room; the telltale streaks of dust along my skirting boards; the weeds sneaking their heads up between the atoms of gravel in the yard; the skipload of Johnny Cash CDs my daughter has abandoned on the floor of the back of our car, in the wrong cases and exposed to the traffic of shoes and the detritus of a driving life cast unthinkingly behind as through there would be no tomorrow. Such a forensics of fear is an interesting exercise because it enables you, by sorting out the components of these dull but grawing feelings, to understand the irrationality of such phenomena and therefore the possibility of dispersing them.

Sometimes, too, I experience a fear of death, or rather a fear of being in the situation where death would become, if not imminent, certainly more real than it was before. You could call it a fear of old age. Sometimes, walking through the house I have lived in for nearly 20 years, I am struck by a sense of passing time that momentarily becomes visible in the way my life is reflected in the detritus cluttering my surroundings, causing me to shiver. It reminds me momentarily of the house of an old lady I used to do messages for as a child. My father called her ‘Mrs Wower’, though not for any reason I recall ever being aware of. She lived directly across the street, a small, stern woman, who seemed to take it for granted that children existed to do her messages. She kept to herself, having just a couple of friends who called to her for chats. She was by then well into her eighties and did not waste her wind on small talk. She had two sons, one of whom had several children whom we used to watch rather enviously from our bedroom window when they would come on their summer holidays in a caravan which they would park in the lane behind the house. Her other son had moved up North and was reputed to have become a protestant, a source of no little disgrace which she carried without outward sign of perturbation.

She would be out polishing the door knocker and would call my mother across on the way from the shops and instruct her to send myself or one of my sisters over. Usually, when I arrived, she would have made a list of all the things she needed, and counted to a few pence the cost of her purchases. But sometimes she would still be in the throes of her inventory or calculations, and I would have to wait while she counted out her money and wrapped it in a small, carefully cut piece of brown paper. When she was doing this, I would look around her mausoleum, a place from a different age. There was always a smell of furniture polish, for she spent most of her time polishing things. Everything seemed dark and burnished. But for all the cleanliness there was something about it that smacked of age and decay and a sense of the pointlessness of such order and cleanliness in a place where nothing beckons but the end.

There was an old man who lived across the road from us whom I used to visit also, mainly because he seemed to have been a close friend of my father’s many years before, though they maintained a respectful distance in later life. My father called him ‘The Gentleman’, because he never seemed to do any work. In his old age he used to invite me in for chats, which generally meant him talking and me listening. He would want to talk about everything he had heard since he had seen me last. He would have a bunch of cue cards on which he would have written notes about things he had heard on the radio and he worked through his agenda systematically while I listened. His home was a good deal messier than Mrs Wower’s, and gradually he moved himself into the back of the house, setting up his bed in a small room off the kitchen. These two rooms became his world.

I think of these people often now, coming to realise how misplaced was the sense I once had that I was not like them. The culture persuaded me to see them differently to myself, to avail of the freedom that youth offered without thought of my fundamental structure, spanning the days of my life, from birth to death. This sense of things was persuasive for a while, but gradually I began to comprehend that nothing the culture offered seemed to take account of my fragility, my mortality, or the exile from the source of my life.

At the heart of the cultural obsession with youth is a fear of death, itself a symptom of loss of faith. Because our generations lack a convinced belief in a Hereafter, all our hopes hinge on the realisation of our appetites in the only existence we know about. The idea that our lives might pass and leave us still full of longing is one that terrifies us to where we seem to remember our souls used to be. Our societies tell us that our chances of happiness depend on the number, denoting chronological age, we carry around in our heads, a description existing just behind our faces, keeping us ever more awake as fear of the ultimate sleep encroaches. All the time we seek an unattainable perfection, waiting to freeze-frame ourselves in that optimal moment, except that this moment never quite seems to arrive.  

Sometimes, nowadays, I have a momentary sense of my life as becoming more like either Mr Wower’s or The Gentleman’s. I walk though my own house and see it as though in the moments or days after my death, full of things which mean nothing to anyone but me. In terms of orderliness, it is closer to the The Gentleman’s, but sometimes the light of a particular afternoon will bring back those childhood moments waiting for Mrs Wower to parcel up her coppers and finish off her shopping list. Again I have this sense of timelessness, but something else as well: the feeling that my sudden identification with Mrs Wower’s reality and my childhood innocence as I gazed around at her surroundings are somehow fused, parcelled together in a ball of longing hurtling through space and time.

Pope Benedict wrote in Spe Salvi:

‘Obviously there is a contradiction in our attitude, which points to an inner contradiction in our very existence. On the one hand, we do not want to die; above all, those who love us do not want us to die. Yet on the other hand, neither do we want to continue living indefinitely, nor was the earth created with that in view. So what do we really want? Our paradoxical attitude gives rise to a deeper question: what in fact is “life”? And what does “eternity” really mean? There are moments when it suddenly seems clear to us: yes, this is what true “life” is — this is what it should be like. Besides, what we call “life” in our everyday language is not real “life” at all. Saint Augustine, in the extended letter on prayer which he addressed to Proba, a wealthy Roman widow and mother of three consuls, once wrote this: ultimately we want only one thing — ”the blessed life”, the life which is simply life, simply “happiness”. In the final analysis, there is nothing else that we ask for in prayer. Our journey has no other goal — it is about this alone. But then Augustine also says: looking more closely, we have no idea what we ultimately desire, what we would really like. We do not know this reality at all; even in those moments when we think we can reach out and touch it, it eludes us. “We do not know what we should pray for as we ought,” he says, quoting Saint Paul (Rom 8:26). All we know is that it is not this. Yet in not knowing, we know that this reality must exist. “There is therefore in us a certain learned ignorance (docta ignorantia), so to speak”, he writes. We do not know what we would really like; we do not know this “true life”; and yet we know that there must be something we do not know towards which we feel driven.

‘I think that in this very precise and permanently valid way, Augustine is describing man's essential situation, the situation that gives rise to all his contradictions and hopes. In some way we want life itself, true life, untouched even by death; yet at the same time we do not know the thing towards which we feel driven. We cannot stop reaching out for it, and yet we know that all we can experience or accomplish is not what we yearn for. This unknown “thing” is the true “hope” which drives us, and at the same time the fact that it is unknown is the cause of all forms of despair and also of all efforts, whether positive or destructive, directed towards worldly authenticity and human authenticity. The term “eternal life” is intended to give a name to this known “unknown”. Inevitably it is an inadequate term that creates confusion.’

Each of us in his own heart must occasionally sit or lie alone, all distraction momentarily quieted, and face the fact that, unless we acknowledge an eternal dimension, life is going nowhere rather than the Somewhere our sense of purpose and intensity seem constantly to insinuate. In such moments, reason may take a different view of everything, as we are returned to the original state of consciousness defined by wonder and surprise. In such moments, the truly reasonable position is one that, wondering at what is, can see no point in being amazed by anything, because it will all be with us always. Everything is possible. There is no reason to be pessimistic. But then we must get up and go out into a world that, in its every inflection and nuance, rejects this perspective as unreasonable, and which tells us that such interventions are unhelpful to the project of human happiness, that all these questions have already been settled, if only by avoidance. Again and again, we are forced to vacate that state of original wonder and embrace what is called ‘realism’. And the ‘real’ is this connection is the urgency of coming to terms with a world that does not embrace or even contemplate our human hopes and longings except for the purposes of selling us things.

Our conventional culture still treats it as axiomatic that time is a consistent entity, a measureable quantity that ticks its way through our lives and onwards into the future. This idea forms an integral element of our thinking about lots of other things, like age and death and the order of the universe. But there is ample evidence that, at the very least, it is nowhere like as simple as this. Many of us are aware of Einstein’s theory of relativity, and even though this is in an academic sense old hat, it remains in our mainstream culture implausible that time might actually pass faster or slower depending on whether you are sitting on a red-hot stove or a lap-dancer’s knee. To conventional culture this seems like a joke, both counter-intuitive and scientifically unreasonable. If we think about it at all, we understand this perspective as existing somewhere between a metaphor and a gag.

But Einstein was deadly serious. He wasn’t speaking in metaphor and he wasn’t making a joke. At the very least he was alerting us to the idea that things we take for granted are sometimes not what they seem. Because time is connected to the earth’s gravitational pull, time passes faster where gravity is weaker. It seems ludicrous, given our sense of the nature of time, to think that someone who lives at the top of a skyscraper ages slightly faster than someone who lives at ground level, but this is implicit in what Einstin asserted in his Theory of General Relativity.

And this is just one of an array of theories about time that, regardless of which ones you believe or which ones you regard as implausible, at the very least demonstrate that we cannot safely create any logical equation with time in it without running the risk of arriving at conclusions that are entirely false. Physicists differ with physicists about what time is; philosophers cannot agree among themselves; but the man in the street thinks he can tell the time by looking at a small mechanical device on his wrist. Our culture is all like that, and many of the ideas we take for granted are arrived at in much the same way.

Some physicists argue that there is no absolute concept of time, that it is purely a human construct and meaningless outside a narrow usage within human civilisations. Others argue that we construct both time and space from our sense of the relationships between things within the physical universe, and this changes under different conditions. Even within our internalised, circumstantial concept of time, our sense of a constant force derives entirely from the approximate conditions of the world we know, which is just one of billions, in each of which the natural laws may be utterly different. Other scientists claim a degree of success in proving that time does not necessarily always move forwards, that it can, in certain situations, travel backwards from the future. We call this ‘science fiction’, underlining just one of many examples of how the condescension of conventional wisdom creates fallacies which remain in the popular consciousness regardless of what science suggests.

There is an odd resonance between this thinking and what the Pope Benedict XVI had to say about eternity. In Spe Salvi, he wrote: ‘“Eternal”, in fact, suggests to us the idea of something interminable, and this frightens us; “life” makes us think of the life that we know and love and do not want to lose, even though very often it brings more toil than satisfaction, so that while on the one hand we desire it, on the other hand we do not want it. To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality — this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time — the before and after — no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John's Gospel: “I will see you again and your hearts shall rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (16:22). We must think along these lines if we want to understand the object of Christian hope, to understand what it is that our faith, our being with Christ, leads us to expect.’

Conventional culture, in other words, forces us into a way of thinking that identifies a line, a kind of border, between this life and the next, when really Earth and Heaven exist in a continuum, approximately corresponding to what physicists call space-time. There is a line, but it exists neither in time nor in space, but rather as the horizon between the three-dimensional reality we see around us and the absolute dimension to which we also, simultaneously, belong. This means that every action, thought and word of ours occurs in both dimensions at once, resonating through space and time as well as falling like a raindrop in the three-second here and now. There is therefore no choice between doing things now or postponing them to the next life. Now is all there is, in this life or the next, though not in the three-second sense, but in an eternal sense of ‘now’ going on for ever. There is no future and no past. Everything we do we do for all time, for eternity, in the infinity of space to which we belong. 

And this is what I already sense happening within myself. Perhaps it has always been happening, but now I have reason to be more aware of it, having less reason to be seduced by the culture of the street. I am drawn to the beauty of the world far more than I was when I had, in theory at least, decades to look at it. But I am filled, too, with a sense that it is only a shadow of the beauty that exists, that beyond this, somewhere, somehow, is the Beauty I have been searching for since the first time I opened my eyes.

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