Theology handbooks do not linger with any special devotion on the subject of eternity. They merely note that eternity is the contemporary and total intuition of all fractions of time, and make a dogged inspection of the Hebrew scriptures in search of fraudulent confirmations in which the Holy Spirit seems to have expressed very badly what the commentator expresses so well. To that end, they like to brandish this declaration of illustrious dis dain or simple longevity: “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day,” or the grand words heard by Moses—”I Am That I Am,” the name of God—or those heard by St. John the Theologian on Patmos, before and after the sea of glass and the scarlet beast and the fowls that eat the flesh of captains: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.”75 They also like to repeat the definition by Boethius (conceived in prison, perhaps on the eve of his execution), “Aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota etperfectpossessio” [Eternity is all oflife interminable and perfect possession], and, more to my liking, Hans Lassen Martensen’s almost voluptuous repetition: “Aeternitas est merum hodie, est immediata et lucida fruitio rerum infinitarum” [Eternity is merely today; it is the immediate and lucid enjoyment of the things of infinity] However, they generally seem to disdain the obscure oath of the angel who stood upon the sea and upon the earth “and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer” (Revelations 10:6). It is true that time in this verse must be synonymous with delay.
Eternity became an attribute of the unlimited mind of God, and as we know, generations of theologians have pondered this mind, in its image and likeness. No stimulus has been as sharp as the debate over predestination ab aeterno. Four hundred years after the Cross, the English monk Pelagius conceived of the outrageous notion that innocents who die without baptism can attain eternal glory.76 Augustine, bishop of Hippo, refuted him with an indignation that was applauded by his editors. He noted the heresies intrinsic to this doctrine, which is abhorred by the righteous and the martyrs: its negation of the fact that in Adam all men have already sinned and died, its abominable heedlessness of the transmission of this death from father to son by carnal generation, its scorn for the bloody sweat, the supernatural agony and the cry of He Who died on the Cross, its rejection of the secret favors of the Holy Spirit, its infringement upon the freedom of the Lord. The British monk had the gall to invoke justice. The Saint—grandiloquent and forensic, as ever—concedes that in justice all men are impardonably deserving of hellfire, but maintains that God has determined to save some, according to His inscrutable will, or, as Calvin would say much later, and not without a certain brutality, because He wants to (quia voluit). Those few are the predestined. The hypocrisy or reticence of theologians has reserved the term for those predestined for heaven. Men predestined for torment there cannot be: though it is true that those not chosen descend into eternal flame, that is merely an omission on the Lord’s part, not a specific action. . . . Thus the concept of eternity was renewed.
Generations of idolatrous men had inhabited the earth without having occasion to reject or embrace the word of God; it was as insolent to imagine they could be saved without this means as to deny that some of them, renowned for their virtue, would be excluded from glory everlasting. (Zwingli in 1523 expressed his personal hope of sharing heaven with Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, Aristides, Aristotle, and Seneca.) An amplification of the Lord’s ninth attribute (omniscience) effectively did away with the difficulty. This attribute, it was proclaimed, amounted to a knowledge of all things, that is to say, not only real things, but also those that are merely possible. The Scriptures were scoured for a passage that would allow for this infinite supplement, and two were found: in I Samuel, when the Lord tells David that the men of Keilah will deliver him up to his enemy if he does not leave the city, and he goes; and in the Gospel According to Matthew, which includes the following curse on two cities: “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.” With this repeated support, the potential modes of the verb could extend into eternity: Hercules dwells in heaven beside Ulrich Zwingli because God knows he would have observed the ecclesiastical year, but He is also aware that the Hydra of Lerna would have rejected baptism and so has relegated the creature to outer darkness. We perceive real events and imagine those that are possible (or future); in the Lord this distinction has no place, for it belongs to time and ignorance. His eternity registers once and for all (uno intelligendi actu) not only every moment of this replete world but also all that would take place if the most evanescent instant were to change-as well as all that are impossible. His precise and combinatory eternity is much more copious than the universe.
Unlike the Platonic eternities, whose greatest danger is tedium, this one runs the risk of resembling the final pages of Ulysses, or even the preceding chapter, the enormous interrogation. A majestuous scruple on Augustine’s part modified this prolixity. His doctrine, at least verbally, rejects damnation: the Lord concentrates on the elect and overlooks the reprobates. He knows all, but prefers to dwell on virtuous lives. John Scotus Erigena, the court schoolteacher of Charles the Bald, gloriously distorted this idea. He proclaimed an indeterminate God and an orb of Platonic archetypes; he spoke of a God who perceives neither sin nor the forms of evil, and also mused on deification, the final reversion of all creatures (including time and the demon) to the primal unity of God: “Divina bonitas consummabit malitiam, aeterna vita absorbebit mortem, beatitudo miseriam” [Divine goodness consumed evil, eternal life absorbed death, and beatitude misery]. This hybrid eternity (which, unlike the Platonic eternities, includes individual destinies, and unlike the orthodox institution, rejects all imperfection and misery) was condemned by the synods of Valencia and Langres. De divisione naturae libri V, the controversial work that described it, was publicly burned, an adroit maneuver that awoke the interest of bibliophiles and enabled Erigena’s book to survive to the present day.
The universe requires eternity. Theologians are not unaware that if the Lord’s attention were to waver for a single second from my right hand as it writes this, it would instantly lapse into nothingness as if blasted by a lightless fire. They affirm, therefore, that the conservation of the world is a perpetual creation and that the verbs conserve and create, so antagonistic here below, are synonyms in Heaven.
III
Up to this point, in chronological order, a general history of eternity. Or rather, of the eternities, for human desire dreamed two successive and mu tually hostile dreams by that name: one, realist, yearns with a strange love for the still and silent archetypes of all creatures; the other, nominalist, denies the truth of the archetypes and seeks to gather up all the details of the universe in a single second. The first is based on realism, a doctrine so dis tant from our essential nature that I disbelieve all interpretations of it, in cluding my own; the second, on realism’s opponent, nominalism, which affirms the truth of individuals and the conventional nature of genres. Now, like the spontaneous and bewildered prose-speaker of comedy, we all do nominalism sans le savoir, as if it were a general premise of our thought, an acquired axiom. Useless, therefore, to comment on it.
Up to this point, in chronological order, the debated and curial development of eternity. Remote men, bearded, mitred men conceived of it, ostensibly to confound heresies and defend the distinction of the three persons in one, but secretly in order to staunch in some way the flow of hours. “To live is to lose time; we can recover or keep nothing except under the form of eternity,” I read in the work of that Emersonized Spaniard, George Santayana. To which we need only juxtapose the terrible passage by Lucretius on the fallacy of coitus:
Like the thirsty man who in sleep wishes to drink and consumes forms of water that do not s
atiate him and dies burning up with thirst in the middle of a river; so Venus deceives lovers with simulacra, and the sight of a body does not satisfy them, and they cannot detach or keep anything, though their indecisive and mutual hands run over the whole body. At the end, when there is a foretaste of delight in the bodies and Venus is about to sow the woman’s fields, the lovers grasp each other anxiously, amorous tooth against tooth; entirely in vain, for they do not succeed in losing themselves in each other or becoming a single being.
The archetypes, eternity—these two words—hold out the promise of more solid possessions. For it is true that succession is an intolerable misery, and magnanimous appetites are greedy for all the minutes of time and all the variety of space.
Personal identity is known to reside in memory, and the annulment of that faculty is known to result in idiocy. It is possible to think the same thing of the universe. Without an eternity, without a sensitive, secret mirror of what passes through every soul, universal history is lost time, and along with it our personal history-which rather uncomfortably makes ghosts of us. The Berliner Company’s gramophone records or the transparent cinema are insufficient, mere images of images, idols of other idols. Eternity is a more copious invention. True, it is inconceivable, but then so is humble successive time. To deny eternity, to suppose the vast annihilation of the years freighted with cities, rivers, and jubilations, is no less incredible than to imagine their total salvation.
How did eternity come into being? St. Augustine ignores the problem, but notes something that seems to allow for a solution: the elements of past and future that exist in every present. He cites a specific case: the recitation of a poem.
Before beginning, the poem exists in my expectation; when I have just finished, in my memory; but as I am reciting it, it is extended in my memory, on account of what I have already said; and in my expectation, on account of what I have yet to say. What takes place with the entirety of the poem takes place also in each verse and each syllable. This also holds true of the larger action of which the poem is part, and of the individual destiny of a man, which is composed of a series of actions, and of humanity, which is a series of individual destinies.
Nevertheless, this verification of the intimate intertwining of the diverse tenses of time still includes succession, which is not commensurate with a model of unanimous eternity.
I believe nostalgia was that model. The exile who with melting heart re members his expectations of happiness sees them sub specie aeternitatis [under the aspect of eternity], completely forgetting that the achievement of one of them would exclude or postpone all the others. In passion, memory inclines toward the intemporal. We gather up all the delights of a given past in a single image; the diversely red sunsets I watch every evening will in memory be a single sunset. The same is true of foresight: nothing prevents the most incompatible hopes from peacefully coexisting. To put it differently: eternity is the style of desire. (The particular enjoyment that enumeration yields may plausibly reside in its insinuation of the eternal—the immediata et Iucida fruitio rerum infinitarum.)
IV
There only remains for me to disclose to the reader my personal theory of eternity. Mine is an impoverished eternity, without a God or even a coproprietor, and entirely devoid of archetypes. It was formulated in my 1928 book The Language of the Argentines. I reprint here what I published then; the passage is entitled “Feeling in Death.”
I wish to record an experience I had a few nights ago: a triviality too evanescent and ecstatic to be called an adventure, too irrational and sentimental for thought. It was a scene and its word: a word I had spoken but had not fully lived with all my being until then. I will recount its history and the accidents of time and place that revealed it to me.
I remember it thus: On the afternoon before that night, I was in Barracas, an area I do not customarily visit, and whose distance from the places I later passed through had already given the day a strange sa vor. The night had no objective whatsoever; the weather was clear, and so, after dinner, I went out to walk and remember. I did not want to establish any particular direction for my stroll: I strove for a maximum latitude of possibility so as not to fatigue my expectant mind with the obligatory foresight of a particular path. I accomplished, to the unsatisfactory degree to which it is possible, what is called strolling at random, without other conscious resolve than to pass up the avenues and broad streets in favor of chance’s more obscure invitations. Yet a kind of familiar gravitation pushed me toward neighborhoods whose name I wish always to remember, places that fill my heart with reverence. I am not alluding to my own neighborhood, the precise circumference of my childhood, but to its still mysterious outskirts; a frontier region I have possessed fully in words and very little in reality, at once adjacent and mythical. These penultimate streets are, for me, the opposite of what is familiar, its other face, almost as unknown as the buried foundations of our house or our own invisible skeleton. The walk left me at a street corner. I took in the night, in perfect, serene respite from thought. The vision before me, not at all complex to begin with, seemed further simplified by my fatigue. Its very ordinariness made it unreal. It was a street of one-story houses, and though its first meaning was poverty, its second was certainly bliss. It was the poorest and most beautiful thing. The houses faced away from the street; a fig tree merged into shadow over the blunted streetcorner, and the narrow portals-higher than the extending lines of the walls-seemed wrought of the same infinite sub stance as the night. The sidewalk was embanked above a street of elemental dirt, the dirt of a still unconquered America. In the distance, the road, by then a country lane, crumbled into the Maldonado River. Against the muddy, chaotic earth, a low, rose-colored wall seemed not to harbor the moonlight but to shimmer with a gleam all its own. Tenderness could have no better name than that rose color.
I stood there looking at this simplicity. I thought, undoubtedly aloud: “This is the same as it was thirty years ago.” I imagined that date: recent enough in other countries, but already remote on this ever changing side of the world. Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for it a small, bird-sized fondness; but there was probably no other sound in the dizzying silence except for the equally timeless noise of crickets. The glib thought I am in the year eighteen hundred and something ceased to be a few approximate words and deepened into reality. I felt as the dead feel, I felt myself to be an abstract observer of the world: an indefinite fear imbued with knowledge that is the greatest clarity of metaphysics. No, I did not believe I had made my way upstream on the presumptive waters of Time. Rather, I suspected myself to be in possession of the reticent or absent meaning of the inconceivable word eternity. Only later did I succeed in defining this figment of my imagination.
I write it out now: This pure representation of homogenous fact—the serenity of the night, the translucent little wall, the small-town scent of honeysuckle, the fundamental dirt—is not merely identical to what existed on that corner many years ago; it is, without superficial resemblances or repetitions, the same. When we can feel this oneness, time is a delusion which the indifference and inseparability of a moment from its apparent yesterday and from its apparent today suffice to disintegrate.
The number of such human moments is clearly not infinite. The elemental experiences-physical suffering and physical pleasure, falling asleep, listening to a piece of music, feeling great intensity or great apathy-are even more impersonal. I derive, in advance, this conclu sion: life is too impoverished not to be immortal. But we lack even the certainty of our own poverty, given that time, which is easily refutable by the senses, is not so easily refuted by the intellect, from whose essence the concept of succession appears inseparable. Let there remain, then, the glimpse of an idea in an emotional anecdote, and, in the acknowledged irresolution of this page, the true moment of ecstasy and the possible intimation of eternity which that night did not hoard from me.
[1936] —Translated by Esther Allen
A Defense of Bou
vard and Pécuchet
The story of Bouvard and Pécuchet is deceptively simple. Two copyists (whose age, like Alonso Quijano’s, verges on fifty) forge a close friendship: an inheritance allows them to leave their work and move to the country; there they try their hand at agronomy, gardening, putting up preserves, anatomy, archaeology, history, mnemonics, literature, hydrotherapy, spiritualism, gymnastics, pedagogy, veterinary medicine, philosophy, and religion, and each of these heterogeneous disciplines holds a disaster in store for them; after twenty or thirty years, disenchanted (as we shall see, the “action” takes place not in time but in eternity), they ask a carpenter to build them a double writing stand, and they set themselves to copying, as before.77
For six years of his life, the final years, Flaubert dedicated himself to the design and execution of this book, which ultimately remained incomplete, which Gosse, so devout an admirer of Madame Bovary, would deem an aberration, and which Remy de Gourmont considered the principal work of French literature, and almost of literature itself.
Emile Faguet (“that greyish Faguet,” Gerchunoff once called him) published a monograph in 1899 that has the virtue of exhausting all the arguments against Bouvard and Pécuchet, which is a convenience for the critical examination of the work. Flaubert, according to Faguet, dreamed of an epic of human idiocy and (moved by memories of Pangloss and Candide and perhaps of Sancho and Quixote) superfluously endowed it with two protagonists who do not complement or oppose one another and whose duality is no more than a verbal artifice. Having created or postulated these nonentities, Flaubert makes them read an entire library so that they will not understand it. Faguet denounces the puerility of this game, and the danger, since Flaubert, in order to come up with the reactions of his two imbeciles, read one thousand five hundred treatises on agronomy, pedagogy, medicine, physics, metaphysics, etc., in the aim of not understanding them. Faguet notes: “If one stubbornly insists on reading from the point of view of a man who reads without understanding, in a very short while one achieves the feat of understanding absolutely nothing and being obtuse oneself.” The fact is that more than five years of coexistence gradually transformed Flaubert into Pécuchet and Bouvard or (more accurately) Pécuchet and Bouvard into Flaubert. The two characters are initially two idiots, scorned and abused by the author, but in the eighth chapter the famous words occur: “Then a lamentable faculty arose in their spirits, that of seeing stupidity and no longer being able to tolerate it.” And: “They were saddened by insignificant things: the advertisements in the newspapers, the profile of a bourgeois, a mindless remark overheard by chance.” Flaubert, at this point, reconciles himself with Bouvard and Pécuchet, God with his creatures. This may happen in every long, or simply living, work (Socrates becomes Plato; Peer Gynt, Ibsen), but here we surprise the moment in which the dreamer, to use a kindred metaphor, notes that he is dreaming and that the forms of his dream are himself.