WHERE TIME AND ETERNITY INTERSECT
My Favourite Quote
What is life?
We are here — thought Mr. Vitkovič — because in this part of the universe time has learned to stop. Perhaps it’s some kind of tamed time. Life is not possible in untamed time, in time that flows, but only in time that has paused for a while. If we realize that eternity descends like a blessing from God, like a kind of light that doesn’t age, as the Byzantine monks say, and that time comes from Satan, to the left of the Temple, we will realize that a “golden intersection” of eternity and time can occur in a certain place. In that cross, where time and eternity intersect, time stops for a moment to be blessed by eternity and that moment is the present. Outside of that present moment, in past and future time, life does not exist, nor has it or shall it ever exist.
So, we are here, because in this part of the universe time pauses and thus enables us life. Perhaps we can imagine time that doesn’t succeed in intersecting with eternity, hence deprived of stopping, namely of the present, and therefore a fruitless, barren time. In such a part of the universe we cannot be, because our basic characteristic is life. But deaths, they can glide up and down the river of time.
What is death?
We could, therefore, conclude that the answer to the question of where does time come from? is: time comes from death. For as long as there is death there shall be time. When death is gone, time shall be no more. Death, then, weaves our time like a spider. For if life is there where time stands still, paused in the moment of now, then death is in the region through which time flows. So time flows through death and pauses in life. Precisely in the spot in which eternity and time intersect at the window of the soul… Death can occur only in the present. Nobody can be killed in his past or in his future. And death is a fragment of our time that has lost the power to stop. For the quantity of time that stops, paused in space, is constant. The excess flows away. And so deaths have to occur.
Milorad Pavić, The Inner Side of the Wind
