The Flame of Eternity by Michalski Krzysztof. Paloff Benjamin

Author:Michalski, Krzysztof.,Paloff, Benjamin.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

VIII

Eternal Love

“WHAT is Love?” Plotinus asks in the Enneads. “A God, a Celestial Spirit, a state of mind?”1

Love: how numerous its forms, how various are all those aspects and moments of life to which we apply that word. Any attempt to reduce them to a common denominator would be foolish. Among this enormous diversity there is also the meaning I will now address: eternal love.

This love is a trace of eternity. It is the presence of eternity in time. It is the revelation of a certain kind of “now”: here, under the apple tree, when I ask you to “set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thine arm” (Song of Solomon 8:6)—this is the discovery of that “now” which signifies “always.” The suspension of time. If “now” means as much as “always,” the difference between “now” and “yesterday,” “now” and “tomorrow”—and thus time itself—loses its meaning. Here, under the apple tree, past and future disappear, and thus death loses its sting: “for love is strong as death.”

Such love sows immortality into the lives of any Dick or Jane, into your life and mine, into life between birth and death. It thrusts the seed of immortality into the ground of everyday life. Such love makes everything that binds you and me to time lose all meaning and vanish. Only you remain—and I. “Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as any army with banners?” (Song of Solomon 6:10). It is you, my love—and it doesn’t matter whether your name is Jane or Juliet. Or that my name is Krzysztof. In our love, we are at the ends of the earth. No, not Australia, but wherever the world ends, where there is no world anymore. After the end of the world. In love we are here, here in this place—but at the same time nowhere, neither in Verona, nor in Springfield, neither here, nor there. Time parts before us, it opens up—and we see the heavens. “Heaven is here, / Where Juliet lives” (Romeo and Juliet III.3).

Love: the place where earth touches the heavens.

So that Rilke writes:

And now he has nothing on. And he is naked as a saint. Bright and slender […]

The tower room is dark.

But they light each other’s faces with their smiles. They grope before them like blind people and find each other as they would a door. Almost like children that dread the night, they press close into each other. And yet they are not afraid. There is nothing that might be against them: no yesterday, no morrow; for time is shattered. And they flower from its ruins.

He does not ask: “Your husband?”

She does not ask: “Your name?”2

Perhaps it was this kind of love—eternal love—that Plotinus had in mind when he sought in love a deity or a celestial spirit. Perhaps this is the kind of love we read about in the Song of Solomon (8:6), translated in the New Jerusalem Bible as “a flame of Yahwe himself.

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