XXII
Some Difficulties in Doing without Eternity
HAVE any of us noticed what a fairyland we lost when we stopped believing in eternity? There was a glamour and a glitter about that past playground of religion which makes our present creed of science barren and chilly. If to-day we write the word Eternity in white chalk on a blackboard, and gazing at it try to recall what it used to signify, we shall find this exercise of the spirit most joyous. The word reminds us how we used to slip away from hurry to bathe in a sea of timelessness, refreshing to every taut nerve. How we exulted and expanded in the belief that eternity would give us all that we could not get in the present, for that was what eternity was for! We should never again be sick or sad or bad. In eternity we should be no longer the puny spawn of monkeys, but beings good and great and glorious as angels. Eternity was full of shining light and serried ranks of singing hosts. Majestic figures from the past walked its wondrous streets and we ourselves walked with them. There was the gleaming of a golden and immortal city, our home at last. There was even in our vision of eternity the presence of God.
Such was the fairyland of faith where once we walked confidently. It is banned now even from our fancy as irrevocably as the elf-kingdom of the nursery. No one now believes we live after we die; it is even deemed reprehensible to want to. Yet for those of us who formerly possessed eternity it is hard all at once to get used to doing without it. We agree with science that eternity should be abolished in the interests of an efficient spiritual life, and yet, without eternity, we sometimes ache with our abrupt adjustment to being merely mortal. Creeds and other comforts have a way of slipping away from us without our seeing. Time and again we can be found blindly struggling to adapt ourselves to some deficiency in our supply of beliefs without any clear conception of the nature of the hole or of our resources for either filling it or enduring it. The present age suffers all the awkwardness of being transitional. In a few decades babies will be born immune to any faith or fear in regard to the future, but meanwhile it is well to examine closely our present difficulties in passing from immortality to annihilation, and perhaps to discover a little help for hobbledehoys. A transitional period should be a little patient with itself, for it suffers both the growing-pains of stretching to the demands of the future and the rheumatic twinges of belonging to a decaying past.
The first difficulty of our adjustment has the nature of a growing-pain, being due to our still imperfect response to the commands of science, which bewilder our dullness by apparent contradiction. When science is all the time bidding us to batter down doors, it is confusing to the mind to have science herself declare that death is the only door that opens nowhere. In every other department of research we are encouraged to the wildest flights of imagination and hypothesis. It is, therefore, increasingly difficult, as we become increasingly inured to scientific adventure, to stop short before the most provocative of all phenomena, the human spirit in its eventful cycle. Eternity seems the only thoroughly scientific explanation of soul. At a mere superficial reading each human life appears like a chapter from a serial rather than a complete volume or a fugitive page tossed on the wind. The chance-blown paragraphs reveal so much that suggests a vigorously conceived plot, powerful characterization, dramatic incident, intense emotion, rich background, that it is almost impossible not to formulate a synopsis of preceding chapters, and to conjecture the dénouement following the catastrophe of death.
It is even at times hard to withstand the conviction that there must be an author. One could almost suspect him of breaking off at a crisis on purpose to make us eager for the next installment. The figure of speech may perhaps make clear to us the primary trouble of our being transitional, namely, the difficulty of being both scientific and unscientific at the same time, for our instinct to understand and explain tends to destroy our pleasure even in the torn chapter we hold in hand; it is hard to work up a proper reading enthusiasm in the face of the positive assertion by science that there will be no “continued-in-our-next.”
The most cursory study of our bygone belief reveals at once other troubles for the present generation in trying too suddenly to get along without a future. We suffer from the working within us of old instincts and superstitions not to be violently uprooted—rheumatic heritage of souls in process of transformation. While our reason admits that there is no valid excuse for being immortal and that our perverse hankering after such a condition argues us self-centered and self-important, all the same there is peril in too abruptly removing the props to personal prestige promised by the mythical joys of our lost fairyland. Our anticipated survival gave us a sense of superiority to the insects, prevented our being sensitive to the silent scoffings of the roadside stones that so long outlast us. Evanescence tends also to undermine our personal affections. It hardly seems worth while to be overfond of relative or friend whom a breath of wind may snuff out like a flame. Why should beings more brittle than beetles go about loving each other as if they were gods? Morally, human frailty was often subconsciously controlled by keeping ourselves fit for the society we expected ultimately to enter, that of saints and sages and perhaps of God Himself.
The first effect of destroying all these expectations is disastrous for people who were far more dependent on them than they dreamed, for, to tell the truth, eternity in the old days had so little apparent relation to our daily conduct that the complete rejection of the concept is like that of some bodily organ whose functioning is deemed negligible until it ceases. Our suffering is no less keen because we recognize it as purely evolutional and temporary. In a few generations people will find as much inspiration in being finite as we used to find in being infinite. Meanwhile, for us who have the luck to be transitional there is perhaps a compromise.
Apart from our personal pangs, the loss of eternity has had effects, social and political, that intensify our private discomfort. Perhaps if our difficulties are clarified we may recognize how burdened we actually are, and be more willing to allow ourselves a makeshift leniency. Chief among the public phenomena directly traceable to the absence of eternity is the war. On a basis of strict mortality, war for aggrandizement becomes the only legitimate activity for person or nation. Reason shows that, since death ends all, material things are the only things worth getting, and even more clearly shows that, since human beings are as finite as mosquitoes, they are no more worthy of preservation. Germany is the most laudably logical nation in the world, but her logic has been a little uncomfortable for the nations who are more sluggish in evolution, and who still cling to their retrogressive respect for spiritual valuations and to their obsolete reverence for the human soul. Of course, if Germany had not purified herself of all taint of faith in eternity, she might conceivably have waited for permeation in peace, instead of being in such a devil of a hurry to chop a way through for her culture. Doubtless, in the course of time other nations will attain Germany’s serene heights of pure reason, but at present it is necessary frankly to admit that aggression, while our brains pronounce it a most rational pastime, is still for our imaginations and sympathies one of the chief temporary discomforts of doing without eternity.
Next to the war in importance of effect stands the high cost of living. Of course we all know that there is enough food for everybody to eat and enough money to pay for it, provided that nobody wants more food than he ought to eat, nor more money than he ought to spend. However, now that we know with absolute certainty that we die when we die, any man would be a fool if he did not try to eat as much and to spend as much as he possibly could. Food and money are the only fun the finite can have, and naturally the effort to get as much as possible of both sends prices soaring. Without penetrating too far into economic intricacies, one can connect the decline in value of the Apocalypse with the advance in value of eggs. The high cost of living is directly due to the high cost of dying; when dying costs annihilation, people have to work pretty hard to get a life’s worth out of seventy years.
Of causes of distress taken in order of popular complaint, next to war and the high cost of living stands the new poetry. The relation between imagism and immortality is so obvious as to be invisible. Granted that the aim of literature is to mirror life, the imagist insistence on aspect versus interpretation is inevitable, for plainly literature should not deal with meanings when life, being mortal, cannot have a meaning. Sensation alone is sufficiently ephemeral to be true to life, whereas a poem that attempts to express some significance beneath phenomena has a tendency to outlast its generation, and runs the risk of endurance, and of becoming, in some notable instances, even immortal, whereas such a reversion toward stability either in a poem or in a person shows each alike false to our faith in flux.