We die and go to heaven, say, but what shall fill our blessed time? The learned doctrines speak of contemplation of the highest High, but we’ve no grasp of contemplation except as passivity.
Eternity is more forbidding than it is inviting—because it more suggests a sound that keeps on going without any ups or downs. There is no start, no climax, no conclusion and such a something spells out boredom to any person long accustomed to the high-low tribulations of life on this here blessed earth.
The problem here, I would propose, is with the concepts, what they hold, not with that which they could mean. For most of us the act of contemplation is actually an active occupation, our minds alive and well. We stare at grand designs of beauty and complexity, see them now in parts and now in wholes, we look at this and cannot understand it until, with effort, we also study that and then, once more, fit this to that and see the new emerge. In this activity we never think of time—unless some urgent need distracts us from the pleasure, joy in which we’re caught.
Eternity, turns out, is just duration, a mere container of our selves. Nothing suggests that contemplation has no ups or downs. Quite to the contrary. If the beauty we behold is infinite, and if our own involvement is an active part of it, if we engage in contemplation because we’re drawn to it, like to a project, if the Beauty draws, teases, and tempts us to explore it, why then that idle harping on the clouds turns into something not unlike what down here we engage in at those blessed times when, no broken washer, dryer interfering, we give rein to our own desire to spend our time on that which pleases most.
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