Read the original post here.
1. Response to Nathaniel’s comment
thank you very much for sharing this. It is profound and thought-provoking. I think you are right that contemplating our insignificance in space is far easier than doing so in time. And I think you are right that we are conditioned to take time for granted, whereas our smallness in space is unavoidable.
I am not quite saying we ‘take time for granted’: we rather learn and work out our being by feeling time and interacting with change, which marks time, and so we are habituated to continuity, invest in it and that breeds hope or at least expectation that demands continuity –
The fight against despair and surrender, at the root of resilience, generates this way of thinking – we hang on to and make the most of every signal of continuity…
And whenever things go well, assurance builds that ‘I/we will not die…’
Without this build-up, time undermines – like an ever-rolling stream. Both today’s cessations and the vision of the final sweeping away of all things which are in time, with us and including us, is disorientating. All the more so since we live with some confidence in continuity, and we do so by working for continuity, by ‘having and holding’ in material and psychic practice. So time, which is not tidily tidal, not moon-managed, but capricious, anarchic, nasty surprises, offends the sense of continuous being we build up and treasure and rely on. It is disorientating in that it stretches us between the poles of an ontological tension.
And I am saying a bit more than that ‘smallness in space is unavoidable’ – it is of course. My point is rather that we get to know ourselves from birth as small amidst the large, and we grow our being in those conditions, without questioning them. We may be very comfortable in what we cannot change. When we are uncomfortable, we work in life to make changes in the arrangement of big and small items in the world but we cannot change or live out of a world composed of big and small. It is the madness of hubris to attempt otherwise, to make a quite different world. Mostly, then, we accommodate ourselves, either to whatever happens (Stoic equanimity?) or to a few things which give us trouble (Paul’s thorn, II Cor 12). Accommodation is feasible because we find the mere size of the Big, and even the Biggest, is not bound to be hostile to our being. Indeed some find a good Father in heaven, biggest of all.
And while the physical universe does not care about earth and its creatures, and has a black hole waiting somewhere to swallow us, within our time we can see that the greatness of Sun and Earth nurtures little being, and does not sweep it away, without a chance. The earth is hospitable in the time the black hole’s waiting allows it, and human beings have enough time to learn that and to celebrate it – as in harvest hymns and a lot of poetry.
The earth’s hospitality if fragile, there are earthquakes and floods, but creatures survive, learn out to cope, and happy times come again.
If in our day, we can see that the end of the earth as a human habitation may be imminently possible, it is, we also see, not because there are bigger powers in the universe, but because we relatively little creatures have used our power to wreck our own living conditions. And we also see that our way of escape and survival lies in respecting and working with the greater powers amongst which, from which, we have our being.
Is not Gaia thinking a way of seeing the fruitful harmony of big and small in the earth?
Though I wondered – to seek an analogy with smallness in space – is it disorientating to consider the long stretch of human history in the past, or the generations ahead of me? do I feel disturbed by words such as
A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
I’m not sure it is my temporal littleness that is disturbing as much as contemplating the sheer fact of not existing, in space or time. Which perhaps is a different thing?
I am not sure I want to speak of temporal littleness. It may be that my argument hides an implied resistance to analogy between time and space, at least as they appear in humanly grown perception. We grow gradually, convincingly, into living in a world of large and small items. But our experience of time, which I think, is more slowly perceived than physical objects, never allows us to rest in what is. Whether in welcome new pleasure or in sad hurtful surprise, what builds our sense of time is change. So we are restless, we go with change or we guard against it – we never quite make peace with it, and it does not allow us to.
Time then cannot be understood as big or little. We have to think rather in terms of change, for what may be judged better or worse. So we wish for the better and fear for the worse.
Leaving aside the question about temporal littleness, the question you raise here still has to be thought about. There was for billions of years a universe without our being there. So when we think of that far past and still distant – we hope – future, we have universe without us, ie a space-time in which we do not exist. Why should that vision disturb us? We are not being asked to be in a world where we cannot exist – and we know in the world today, there are plenty of places where we could not exist and so we keep clear – the ocean depths for instance.
It is intellectually irritating, rather than disturbing, it is quizzical one might say, to contemplate there being Nothing. As Descartes told us, if I can contemplate, ‘non-existing’ cannot be for at least I am.
But what is it to contemplate everything’s ‘not existing’? Can it be done? To what point?
It is said, the wonder is that Something exists rather than nothing – that may help us to appreciate the wonder of what is, the wonder that any thing is, but it is not a contemplation of non-existence is it? 1I am reminded here of John Clare’s mysterious and sad poem, which I think may resonate with this discussion but does not join with it in any clear way:
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows – is a line that gets near to expressing a ‘non-existence’ which includes the speaker. Yet it is no sooner said than it fills us with sadness, arising from a strong immediate sympathetic awareness of the person who is speaking here –
As I expect you know, he was a troubled man, from many angles, including the destruction of nature by enclosures and by his own mental ill-health. He has had enough of time, of human living, but seeks to rest in the big and little in the world –
…And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
in either case, the question stands – ought we to live as though we will not die?
Perhaps we ought not to live in untruth, deceiving ourselves?
We ought to live as well as we can as fully as we can each day, even if we know or sense it may be our last.
Do some not live as though they will not die right up until the very end – and does this not allow a kind of positive, life-embracing spirit?
What is a positive life-embracing spirit in the face of imminent or future dying? It is surely not to present an unreal self, holding on to what we have as though it is in fact or in right inalienable. But it would be life-embracing to accept dying for oneself, and to think of and bless others, not to be bitter about my loss, but to rest in God’s hands, along with all the others God embraces, and to care ‘how the next generation will live’, as Bonhoeffer put it (LPP ‘After Ten Years’, section on Success, and other sections…).
at the same time – I wonder if that kind of living becomes an impossibility at some point – when people have advanced terminal illnesses, does life not call for something else?
and in general – are there aspects of finitude that we ought to contemplate as part of our responsibility in the time we have? In the way that corporations do ‘succession planning’ or you hear about ‘Swedish death cleaning’?
Yes, I agree and know about succession planning.
– that is one reason why people have children, though they may not put it like that. Thanks for introducing me to ’death cleaning’ which sounds a good thing.
“It is a delight to go through things and remember their worth.” Yes indeed – thank you for getting me into this website work.
2. Brenda comment
I have read your paper a couple of times and am intrigued by your suggested explanation for our acceptance of our littleness in space. The challenge of the finitude of time is complicated by a taboo on talking about it in our culture.
If ever I say: “I probably shan’t be here then” to Adam (Muslim) I’m told it’s not good to have those negative thoughts. Actually, it is usually realism, not negativism, but I avoid the situation as it obviously upsets him.
When I asked my doctor (Jewish) to help me fill out a ‘do not resuscitate’ instruction, he complied but spent about half an hour questioning me as to why, as I had no terminal condition, as far as we were aware – apart from life itself. (Meanwhile, people were queuing up in the surgery waiting room and I crept out a bit shame faced!) My response to his questioning, incidentally, was that my knowledge was that resuscitation at our age was rarely a positive experience for self or family; I had already had a long, happy and fulfilled life, why risk ending it as a burden/pain to my ever lovely family.
What does the Psalmist tell us? Three score years and ten, and an extra ten if you are lucky. I started saying thank you for every day after 70 years. I’m on borrowed time now and enjoying it.
This doesn’t offer any deep thoughts on the issue you were analysing. And I have no assumptions about ‘pie in the sky when I die’. I know I shall be remembered – well for a while anyway! Clay to clay, I know I shall benefit the ecology of Thornton Green Burial site (or somewhere else if they are full up!). Actually that is enough, however if there is more then I wait in trust and hope for ‘the new heaven and the new earth’ to be revealed. Does that sound really arrogant? Or, ‘heaven forbid’, unChristian?
I do think it would be good to challenge the taboo and develop the skills to enable more folk to be able to embrace a peace as death comes.
Notes
- 1I am reminded here of John Clare’s mysterious and sad poem, which I think may resonate with this discussion but does not join with it in any clear way:
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows – is a line that gets near to expressing a ‘non-existence’ which includes the speaker. Yet it is no sooner said than it fills us with sadness, arising from a strong immediate sympathetic awareness of the person who is speaking here –
As I expect you know, he was a troubled man, from many angles, including the destruction of nature by enclosures and by his own mental ill-health. He has had enough of time, of human living, but seeks to rest in the big and little in the world –
…And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.