Eternity is actually the absence of time
My bedtime reading last night consisted of a few pages of John Cowper Powys’s The Art of Growing Old. Since I am only two years shy of the Biblical age, I figure it’s high time to get some pointers on how to deal with my impending dotage.
Powys, described by J.B. Priestley as “that eccentric novelist of genius,” has never been a popular writer, but has always attracted distinguished admirers, as Margaret Drabble pointed out a couple of years ago in a piece titled “The English Degenerate.” The Art of Growing Old is one of the “manuals of self-help” that Drabble refers to. Others include The Art of Happiness and In Defense of Sensuality.
I will leave Drabble to fill you in on Powys and his work. What I want to draw to your attention is one of the paragraphs I read last night:
Where then is the escape? Where is the Truth? Where is the Reality? Where is Rest and Reassurance? In one direction only; in that inviolable Present which is not our age, nor our father’s nor our children’s, but is the ever-recurring Moment where all Pasts and all Futures and all Presents form and transform and meet and mix and resolve and dissolve; till sinking down with Time itself, their creator and sustainer and destroyer and restorer, into the solitary soul of every one of us, they become that sub-species of eternity which perhaps is the only eternity we shall ever know.
I decided, before turning out the light last night, that this would be the subject of my next column, which is to say this one you are reading. Just before I fell asleep, and just after I woke up, I had in mind to write about what, initially, I took from it, which was that the only time that is real is the time we are experiencing, namely, the present.
But now that I have copied out the paragraph and read it more carefully, I realize that isn’t exactly what Powys is saying at all. If I read him aright — or, rather, re-read him aright — he is suggesting that each moment is a singular manifestation of the whole of time. It is interesting that he calls this “ever-recurring Moment” a “sub-species of eternity.” Eternity tends to be thought of as time without end, being alive minus the inevitable termination otherwise known as death. But eternity is actually the absence of time, along with, presumably, the change that accompanies it. In “Sunday Morning,” Wallace Stevens makes plain exactly how difficult this is to comprehend:
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Powys wonders if the only experience we can have of this is the experience we are having right now. I find no difficulty with the thought that this moment of my being contains somehow the whole of my past and that my future is but the continuing expansion of that same past (incorporating, of course, this present moment). But that this moment is somehow connected to the whole of time I can only assent to intellectually, the way I can assent to the idea that I am somehow connected to the whole universe. I can think it, but I don’t really feel it.
On the other hand, something else Powys says a few paragraphs later makes a great deal of sense to me. Referring to “the ages in history that suit our temperament,” Powys goes on to say that “it is within our power to move from the one to the other, appropriating, by what might be called imaginative empathy, those earlier ages that suit our nature.” Surely I am not the only person to feel a strange affinity with certain historical periods. In my case, those would be the China of the Tang period, the so-called 12th-century renaissance in Europe, and 19th-century France.
I am well aware of the shortcomings of each of those periods, but there is something about them that strikes a chord within my sensibility. It is hard to know what to make of this, but Powys’s notion of a sub-species of eternity might go some way to explaining it. Henry Miller, one of Powys’s admirers, says somewhere that happiness consists mostly in finding a more or less pleasant way of passing the time. This seems a sound observation. Only there may be a good deal more time to pass than we imagine.
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I think it would be more accurate to say “time is the absence of eternity” than to say “eternity is the absence of time.” If the present is a sub-species of eternity, think of it as a window that can open into a transcendent state. One problem with the idea of the “moment,” is that it seems like a limit between a past that has receded, while leaving traces, and a future that does not exist yet, except potentially.
I like that idea – time as the absence of eternity. I was, of course, just countering the notion of eternity as time without end, whereas eternity is more properly understood as the end of time. On the other hand, there are “moments” that also seem to take us out of time, that serve as what you call “a window that can open into a transcendent state.’