The Problem of Eternity
Meditations | 011
It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only - or even at all - in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way. ~ Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
I cannot remember when I first noticed the Eternal Aesthetic but since then I have struggled to look away. Our connected culture has proliferated this ethos across geographical and cultural boundaries. You see it in every liminal-brutalist-minimalist-urbanist office space and apartment complex. In millions of stock images showcasing eerie emptiness and the faint glow of a light source you can never pinpoint. In the seamless somnolent drone of chillhop and ambient and endless varieties of -waves. We are become a people of tenders, prodding and adjusting our internal and external worlds in search of a perfection that constantly remains untasted. Deluged by speed and anxiety, we seek a mass exodus into a pocket universe where time stands still. Expressions of the Eternal Aesthetic seem to invite a deep breath of reflection, a slowing heartrate, a sense of placelessness extending to the horizon. We long to be immersed in the Other Place.
We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien
Even our current obsession with Aesthetics themselves seems to me an outgrowth of the timeless longing. We are ever searching for the perfect combination of look and feel, the ideal expression of places we wish could replace our current tragic environment. The restless creation of mood board and playlist reflects our inner discontent with any imperfection in the vibes. Not just my home, but Cottagecore. Not the city that I live in, but Blade Runner. Not the school where I learn and grow, but Dark Academia. Every strange eccentricity must be sanded carefully away so that image after image and sound after sound orbit the same midpoint. Not identical, but neutral. This is maybe why the Aesthetic pursuit can be so fleetingly satisfying. No single dose of your favored environmental factors can every truly capture the invisible and fleeting perfection you hope to find on the very next try. What a tragic longing to fill our days, as we commute and cook and clean and make love. Forever hearing the siren call of Home as we try to make do presently.
Frodo was now safe in the Last Homely House east of the Sea. That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, "A perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all." Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness. ~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
But you see, we are not wholly wrong to feel this way. We are not yet Home. And, consciously or no, our restlessness drives us forward as we attempt new combinations of Here and Now, testing them against Somewhere and Somewhen. We are forever pushing aside the present to hold it in comparison against the snatches of song and briefest glimpses of color from the Heavenly Realm. Building a temporal vessel inside our library or studio apartment, we hope to rocket outside the bonds of death and glimpse the never-perished untime of God’s life. If I sit here, very still, then within the four walls of this magical adorned temple to time perhaps I won’t be able to perceive the inexorable march of seconds. Then maybe I’ll be free, immersed in the perfectly arranged amber molecules of my aesthetic. The decay and the rot cannot reach me in here. Arranging my tiny chips of Beauty into neatly ordered playlists. I keep hoping that microdosing Eternity will miraculously extend my existence.
You say that the materialist universe is "ugly." I wonder how you discovered that? If you really are a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would not that fact itself strongly suggest that they had not always been, or wd. not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ("How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up & married? I can hardly believe it!") In heaven's name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.
~ C.S. Lewis, letter to Sheldon Vanauken, 1950But you see, it’s a hopeless endeavor. In fact, it ruins even the gifts I fail to enjoy by converting them into an infernal life-extension machine. Children aren’t meant to be imprisoned in frames, they’re meant to transform into good men and women. Songs aren’t meant to be sorted, they’re meant to be sung. Money isn’t meant for leverage but for largesse. Our gifts are from an eternally cheerful Giver who has unlimited stores and delights in our spendthrift gratitude. This will only work if you know the Giver. The assurance of undeath frees you to correctly value life. And the correct value for temporal life is a pittance weighed in eternal scales. Why hoard a few years? Others will watch your heedless enjoyment of briefest moments and curse your lack of prudence and unseemly hope. How could they understand? They are dying. You never will.
It is an illusion to think that modern people who accept modernity are ever likely to start going to Church again. Modernity is satisfaction with accumulated, saved and cashed time. It is closure against grace. So mission involves war on modernity. Reclaiming open time. ~ John Milbank
The clutter and the mismatches and the brokenness are your friends. They are invitations to chuckle with blackest humor at the very state of this place. To laugh knowingly at the Fall of Man itself even as you strive to push back the most grievous effects. Don’t lose your bearings. Careful not to feather this fleeting nest too well. It’s all getting packed up soon anyway. Spare a chuckle for your aching bones and crumbling surroundings. Spend your time. Why are you taking so seriously the shortest span of your everlasting life? Don’t be so busy perfecting the look of the place. It is enough for the space we slowly die in to gently remind us of where we are going. Eternity lies dormant in our bones. It scratches at our minds and won’t let us rest in the shade of these trees and this house. That’s only a problem if we haven’t begun the only Journey worth taking. Don’t worry about tomorrow. We’re going Home.
One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple. ~ Psalm 27:4
Lots of great takeaways here. In Fight Club, he knew that trying to recreate Eden in this lifetime was a fruitless task so he blew it up.
Lovely stuff you've written here. We're going Home.