What I love most about these is the impossibility of the task: to convey in words an ineffable, mystical experience of immortality.
1. Sappho, “Although They Are”
Greece’s greatest lyric poet didn’t leave us much, only fragments of fragments (including poem #58, whose wreckage was recently discovered as part of the papyrus packing wrapping up an Egyptian mummy). This four liner shows how right she was.
Although they are
only breath, words
which I command
are immortal
2. R.M. Bucke, from Cosmic Consciousness
R.M. Bucke was a 19th century Canadian psychiatrist who befriended Walt Whitman and had mystical seizures which he wrote about in analytic prose. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James quoted extensively from Bucke’s “highly interesting volume,” Cosmic Consciousness, which describes a “sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life.”
“All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed.”
3. Jorge Luis Borges, in The History of Eternity
William James once declared immortality to be, in his estimation, a minor problem. He was joking, of course, as Borges reminds us in his essay entitled “Immortality.” Borges often wrote—in stories, poems, and articles—about immortality and the limits of understanding. Here’s his attempt at conveying a moment where he seemed to fully grasp the meaning of the word eternity.
“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 through 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 substance as the night... 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… 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.”
4. Herman Melville, in Moby Dick
This excerpt is one of my favorite pieces of writing. I love that the experience of seeing steam rise from head, like the vapor from a whale’s spout, happens to him “while composing a little treatise on Eternity.” The whale, eternity, him, words, irradiated vapor: everything merges, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.
“I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument for the above supposition. And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor—as you will sometimes see it—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions.”
