Our Eternity

by Maurice Maeterlinck

This is the gloomiest thought to which man can attain. So far, I do not think that its depths have been sufficiently sounded. If it were really irrefutable—and some may contend that it is—if it actually contained the last word of the great riddle, it would be almost impossible to live in its shadow. Naught save the certainty that our conceptions of time and space are illusive and absurd can lighten the abyss wherein our last hope would perish.

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This universe thus conceived would be, if not intelligible, at least admissible by our reason; but in that universe float billions of worlds limited by space and time. They are born, they die and they are born again. They form part of the whole; and we see, therefore, that parts of that which has neither beginning nor end themselves begin and end. We, in fact, know only those parts; and they are of a number so infinite that in our eyes they fill all infinity. That which is going nowhere teems with that which appears to be going somewhere. That which has always known what it wants, or will never learn, seems to be eternally experimenting with more or less ill-success. At what goal is it aiming, since it is already there? Everything that we discover in that which could not possibly have an object looks as though it were pursuing one with inconceivable ardour; and the mind that animates what we see in that which should know everything and possess itself seems to know nothing and to seek itself without intermission. Thus all that is apparent to our senses in infinity gainsays that which our reason is compelled to ascribe to it. According as we fathom it, we come to understand how deep is our want of understanding; and, the more we strive to penetrate the two incomprehensible problems that stand face to face, the more they contradict each other.

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What will become of us amid all this confusion? Shall we leave the finite wherein we dwell to be swallowed up in this or the other infinite? In other words, shall we end by absorption in the infinite which our reason conceives, or shall we remain eternally in that which our eyes behold, that is to say, in numberless changing and ephemeral worlds? Shall we never leave those worlds which seem doomed to die and to be reborn eternally, to enter at last into that which, from all eternity, can neither have been born nor have died and which exists without either future or past? Shall we one day escape, with all that surrounds us, from this unhappy speculation, to find our way at last into peace, wisdom, changeless and boundless consciousness, or into hopeless unconsciousness? Shall we have the fate which our senses foretell, or that which our intelligence demands? Or are both senses and intelligence only illusions, puny implements, vain weapons of an hour, which we never intended to examine or defy the universe? If there really be a contradiction, is it wise to accept it and to deem impossible that which we do not understand, seeing that we understand almost nothing? Is truth not at an immeasurable distance from these inconsistencies which appear to us enormous and irreducible and which, doubtless, are of no more importance than the rain that falls upon the sea?

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But, even to our poor understanding to-day, the discrepancy between the infinity conceived by our reason and that perceived by our senses is perhaps more apparent than real. When we say that, in a universe that has existed since all eternity, every experiment, every possible combination has been made; when we declare that there is no chance that what has not taken place in the uncountable past can take place in the uncountable future, our imagination perhaps attributes to the infinity of time a preponderance which it cannot possess. In truth, all that infinity contains must be as infinite as the time at its disposal; and the chances, encounters and combinations that lie therein have not been exhausted in the eternity that has gone before us any more than they could be in the eternity that will come after us. The infinity of time is no vaster than the infinity of the substance of the universe. Events, forces, chances, causes, effects, phenomena, fusions, combinations, coincidences, harmonies, unions, possibilities, lives are represented in it by innumerous numbers that entirely fill a bottomless and vergeless abyss where they have been shaken together from what we call the beginning of the world that had no beginning and where they will be stirred up until the end of a world that will have no end. There is, therefore, no climax, no changelessness, no immovability. It is probable that the universe is seeking and finding itself every day, that it has not become entirely conscious and does not yet know what it wants. It is possible that its ideal is still veiled by the shadow of its immensity; it is also possible that experiments and chances are following one upon the other in unimaginable worlds, compared wherewith all those which we see on starry nights are no more than a pinch of gold-dust in the ocean depths. Lastly, if either be true, it is also true that we ourselves, or what remains of us—it matters not—will profit one day by those experiments and those chances. That which has not yet happened may suddenly supervene; and the next state, with the supreme wisdom which will recognize and be able to establish that state, is perhaps ready to arise from the clash of circumstances. It would not be at all astonishing if the consciousness of the universe, in the endeavour to form itself, had not yet encountered the combination of necessary chances and if human thought were actually supporting one of those decisive chances. Here there is a hope. Small as man and his brain may appear, they have exactly the value of the most enormous forces that they are able to conceive, since there is neither great nor small in the immeasurable; and, if our body equalled the dimensions of all the worlds which our eyes can see, it would have exactly the same weight and the same importance as compared with the universe that it has to-day. The mind alone perhaps occupies in infinity a space which comparisons do not reduce to nothing.

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For the rest, if everything must be said, at the cost of constantly and shamelessly contradicting one’s self in the dark, and to return to the first supposition, the idea of possible progress, it is extremely probable that this again is one of those childish disorders of our brain which prevent us from seeing the thing that is. It is quite as probable, as we have seen above, that there never was, that there never will be any progress, because there could not be a goal. At most there may occur a few ephemeral combinations which, to our poor eyes, will seem happier or more beautiful than others. Even so we think gold more beautiful than the mud in the street, or the flower in a splendid garden happier than the stone at the bottom of a drain; but all this, obviously, is of no importance, has no corresponding reality and proves nothing in particular.

The more we reflect upon it, the more pronounced is the infirmity of our intelligence which cannot succeed in reconciling the idea of progress and even the idea of experiment with the supreme idea of infinity. Although nature has been incessantly and indefatigably repeating herself before our eyes for thousands of years, reproducing the same trees and the same animals, we cannot contrive to understand why the universe indefinitely recommences experiments that have been made billions of times. It is inevitable that, in the innumerable combinations that have been and are being made in termless time and boundless space, there have been and still are millions of planets and consequently millions of human races exactly similar to our own, side by side with myriads of others more or less different from it. Let us not say to ourselves that it would require an unimaginable concourse of circumstances to reproduce a globe like to our earth in every respect. We must remember that we are in the infinite and that this unimaginable concourse must necessarily take place in the innumerousness which we are unable to imagine. Though it need billions and billions of cases for two features to coincide, those billions and billions will encumber infinity no more than would a single case. Place an infinite number of worlds in an infinite number of infinitely diverse circumstances: there will always be an infinite number for which those circumstances will be alike; if not, we should be setting bounds to our idea of the universe, which would forthwith become more incomprehensible still. From the moment that we insist sufficiently upon that thought, we necessarily arrive at these conclusions. If they have not struck us hitherto, it is because we never go to the farthest point of our imagination. Now the farthest point of our imagination is but the beginning of reality and gives us only a small, purely human universe, which, vast as it may seem, dances in the real universe like an apple on the sea. I repeat, if we do not admit that thousands of worlds, similar in all points to our own, in spite of the billions of adverse chances, have always existed and still exist to-day, we are sapping the foundations of the only possible conception of the universe or of infinity.