Permanence

An urge to contradict the flux of time is present in the soul. Monuments are outward expressions of this innate tendency. So is recording things. In effect it seems to be a marker of consciousness itself. Our sense of time is meaningless without our intuitive perception of genuine permanence. We can’t actually observe it in nature, but we feel it in ourselves as a permanent self. That self sometimes, rarely, becomes sharply distinguished from the flux of thought, and as we recall moments like that from childhood, we are aware that nothing has changed, not in that feeling, and this despite the flow of decades in between.

I clearly, sharply remember one of these moments as a child of seven in my grandmother’s back yard when, all alone and sure of it, I tried to imitate the fiery oration of a newly minted Nyilas (read Nazi) prime minister of Hungary—and in the process suddenly became equally sharply self-aware and stopped. I’d no idea what a Nazi was, by the way; I was just imitating the fervor I’d heard on the radio. That moment of solitary self-awareness left a very deep impression. I was suddenly present, somehow; and at that time I also remembered yet another such occasion when I had been four. And this, the permanent self, after that, became my odd point of permanence in light of which I’ve always tried to live. Not consciously, mind. The consciousness of this linkage developed as I grew wiser. But now I know that this permanence, this moment, is the fixed point from which anything and everything can be viewed with timeless equanimity.

Many people are dizzied, troubled by the concept of eternity, when trying to think about it. The reason for this, I assume, is that they think of it under the rubric of time, thus of change or motion—rather than the very opposite of change, namely permanence. And permanence is in another order, another dimension. Such permanence, if we are lucky, is always present in us if we but stop. That we can stop and experience it tells us that we’re strangers here.