Existential Angst in the Void

      My first memories are of the dogtrot log house that was my great grandfather’s before the Civil War. My mother grew up there, and I was there when my father was off in Europe fighting Nazis and my little brain began storing memories. The house stood in the now-dead community of Abercrombie in Bibb County, a few miles before the road ends in the Talladega National Forest--so deep in the country that my grandmother used to wonder whose car was passing at the bottom of the hill. Now, it sits on another rise, reassembled log-by-log in Tannehill Historical State Park. Tourists rent it by the night. But in 1945 the house was all family, and we spent long horsefly-swatting vacations there until my grandparents’ health failed late in the 1950s.

     A dogtrot house is a pair of matched log cabins with a a dogtrot (what we’d call a breezeway) between them. The kitchen was a separate building behind one side, and there was little lean-to room on the back of the other ("Cotton's room," once my albino uncle's). The room on the kitchen side was the bedroom-parlor where a fire burned all winter in a fieldstone chimney. The big room across the dogtrot was Mother’s, where we slept in two giant oak beds with headboards towering toward the board ceiling, warm under downy quilts until the rooster crowed. 

     It was about 1950 on one of these visits when I lay on my back on the right side of the left bed (a flashbulb memory) and stared up into eternity. I’ve never forgotten those minutes but would have been hard-pressed to describe them until a paragraph from Pascal’s Pensees brought them flooding back—that juvenile existential crisis under chicken feathers in an Abercrombie winter. It’s a vision I’ve often averted eyes from but never forgotten:

     “When I consider the brief span of my life,” Pascal writes in Pensee 68, “ absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after—as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day—the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then.”

     This sort of awakening goes with physical dislocation. I once woke up in a London flat struggling to remember where I then lived in America. I think the Abercrombie vision also had to do with radio news on the drive up, Gabriel Heatter and his Cold War warnings of the perils threatening America, God’s gift to the free world (https://youtu.be/vVX0uZQWT6I). Maybe the thin spot in the ice that broke through to the void was wondering how come Billy Green wasn't born some bad place like Russia, but, once the ice broke, the void was temporal too. Why now? Why in the great 20th century out of all eternity, and what about eternity? Time going on forever? Try to imagine, not timelessness, but duration stretching to the unknown and then trillions of unknowns beyond that.

     Who knows what analogies little Billy spun in that oak bed, but here’s one one? If, in an eternal life, I took one accompanied walk per millennium, taking turns walking an infinite number of possible paths with an infinite number of different people, I would have time to walk every path with every person an infinite number of times. Even God seems challenged by this scale. How can he believe he is eternal, given the abysses of time that haven’t happened yet, compared to which the billions of years that we know the universe has existed are nothing. 

     And so goes little Billy’s bewildering vision of eternity, which I do see a couple of answers to. One is that people don't think a gazillion gazillion Big Bangs into futurity. They just want to live. It’s not about forever as much as tomorrow. We have so adapted to our brief lives that a century seems a long time, and we value much shorter spans. A condemned man exonerated just before his execution, even if he is eighty years old with a weak heart, celebrates having his “life” spared despite his certain death in a few years. Tomorrow is all. We speak of saving a life regardless of actuarial odds. Murder is murder even in a hospice. The desire for life everlasting may be like Desdemona’s plea to Othello: “Kill me tomorrow. Let me live tonight.”

     For young Billy, eternity was endless time, an ever-flowing river. It was that simple—heartbeats, sunsets, and the ticking of clocks—but physics today understands time to be relative, definite only in a given context of space and matter-energy. There is no such thing as absolute time, infinite or otherwise, because “clocks” of matter-energy run at different rates. Since light-speed travel freezes time, for a photon the universe is only moments old. So here's another eternity: not endless flow, not a river, but a relativistic “block universe” where all times and places are frozen space-time. 

     This viewpoint, standing outside of duration, evokes the perspective of God according to orthodox theologians from Aquinas to Augustine, who argue that God is timeless, without beginning or end. Eternity in this view is absence of duration. Mystics of many traditions see this state—or, at least, a sense of it—as a goal, but it remains alien to our ordinary experience. One sense of eternity—and perhaps what the New Testament calls “everlasting life”—is a state of full presence, existence in the Now free of pride and regret about the past, hope and worry about the future. The Upanishads observe that this is experienced in deep sleep, but mystics both East and West describe touching eternity, associated with the presence of God, through contemplation. 

     The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence, a monastery cook whose work in the noisy kitchen was continuous prayer, tells us that life outside time need not imply forgetfulness (http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5657/pg5657.txt). In its highest form, it seems to be, not amnesia, but awareness cleansed of pride, regret, hope, and worry. It may be the Gita’s state of acting without attachment to outcomes, living in the world but not of it, recognizing the ego and its entanglements as Maya or illusion—the end of the path taught by Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Muslim, and Christian mystics alike. Obviously, living in eternity doesn’t confer physical immortality. The material clocks tick on. Brother Lawrence and Siddhartha aged and died. They simply didn't consider this fact important.

     I passed windows into eternity as a late teen, not many years after my shattering sense of lostness. Of course, life went on, and after several blooms of infatuation, I fell desperately in love at seventeen. There was still—behind every smile and flower—a grim sense that Billy’s universe was one cracked skull away from the void, that life was a ticking bomb. Eternity was no longer my friend. In the fall my senior year, after a summer of writing unrequited love poems to my “femme ideal,” she accepted my invitation to an Episcopal hayride. 
        We sat by the tailgate of the hay wagon—right side (flashbulb memory again)—my left arm around her warm shoulder in the cool air. I don’t recall what we said, but we talked or dispensed with talking, alone together in wagonload of others, and the bomb stopped ticking. I saw eternity in an hour. She’s a dear friend now, six decades later after losing touch in college and reconnecting on the Internet (maybe closer to my wife than to me now in our twice-a-year reunions), a beautiful, accomplished woman who validates my juvenile taste, but she no longer stops my clock.

     The change is in me, not her. What I felt, I think, in that Episcopal hay wagon was the voice of transcendent instinct saying, “That’s what I’m talking about, boy. Make babies.” I did, in fact, make four of them with other women, and during most of those family decades the ticking bomb was muted (until the midlife crisis of ‘84, but that’s another story). Anyway, the elan vital—or testosterone, serotonin, or whatever—gives flashes of eternity on the cheap when we are young, such as this one on a Columbus, Georgia, street preserved in a verse from 1961:

            As shadows of the undead pace the strand

     between the gutter and the plate-glass wall

     and pause to look at clocks and lingerie,

     and as you warm into my hand your hand,

     I would not mind if this small scene were all.

     I’d smile if an undead walked up to say,

     “The show’s a wash. They soon turn off the sun.”

     This now is nice. Who needs another one?

     At any age, love gives us a place to rest and not be swallowed up in Pascal’s “infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me.” In 1961, the touch of a woman’s hand on a Christmas street was enough to justify the ways of God to man. When youthful juices are flowing (if memory and juvenilia serve), eros is an addictive drug, the loss of which drains meaning from life, an existential foundation so absolute that people die and kill for it. However, a sense of time standing still is among things that don’t rise quite as they once did with my wife of fifty years. I look in religious directions for answers to Billy Green’s questions in an Abercrombie where almost everybody who was there then is dead now but me.