In the book The Three Musketeers, by Dumas, there is a discussion about the longing to die. Apparently, if we were consistent if the christian faith in an afterlife future of heavenly delight and the presence and communion with God, we would want to die. The same want of eternity seems to make a subtle presence in the movie The Last Samurai, where the fighting scenes are taken with such ardor and totality by the two main characters, that it would seem that dying is their main goal in life.
In fact, although we might say that many people flee to religion because they are afraid to die, the fact seems to be that once they believe in the ideal of a perfect afterlife, all they will want is to get there, and life will become an almost unbearable weight, a long suffering, for those waiting to be released into the world of eternity.
Even when we are not religious persons a longing or death can occur if life conditions get too evil. We've all seen in the movies people wanting to be killed if they are being severely tortured. And other situations in life exist where it would be better to just "turn out the switch", if it was as simple as that. But there is the family, and friends, and difficulty of the process of killing oneself.
But what gets really interesting is when we really contemplate dying, either because we're sick or old or are just too tired of living. In all of these discussions in the book by Dumas, or the movie, or the person that feels imprisoned in his life, death appears as some kind of dream, an ideal, where everything would be good, just like that ex-lover that seemed incredible perfect adorned by the light of the absent. But when it is close to become a reality you wake up: wait! that is not the person with which I want to be. It is not really death I am looking for. Then what is?
I think that we are looking for, all of us, good and bad, lovers and terrorists, to live in eternity. Some more consciously, some more like an impossible hope, some through the strangest ways and devices, but that is what we looking for. However eternity is not here nor there. It is not in living or dying, but in "understanding".
I've put understanding between quotation marks, but that is really not enough to explain what I mean by it. I do not mean a conceptual understanding, or even an emotional understanding, but that kind of understanding that makes you see an instrumental piece of music, where it comes from and where it goes to, what it means in some sort of hard to define sense. Or when you look at a person for the first time and you really understand her, not in a definite, conceptual way, but you know "everything's being said", in one look, everything is clear. No words, lifestories you can exchange could enlighten further that gaze, it could only fill it with excessive details, distractions, eventualities, possibilities, but not her herself, not the heart of hearts. That you have captured in the moment. In an eye blink or two. Your mind won't get it, you'll forget it, you can't tell it or explain it to anyone completely. But you got a connection, you got a feel for that person, and you can join in from wherever you are.
The same with Eternity, it's what encompasses everything, from a galls of water to all the interplanetary oceans in the world, to every molecule and being, to the beyond. Living in the eternity cannot be achieved through reasoning, much less through emotion, much less through the senses. Perhaps love would be a key in the road to get it, perhaps clarity and a radical honesty would be other keys. But getting Eternity seems much more like a Realization of who you are, where you came from and where you are going.
When you contemplate real death, you suddenly understand the preciousness of each moment. And everything now makes sense. the hardships of life, the encounters and disencounters, the loneliness and the bliss, the search and the arriving. Struggling now makes sense, because it is so ephemeral. What you win, what you loose, has no importance in the vast infinity of time, and precisely because it is vastly, almost infinitely, small and unadorned by fear, it gains its sense, its original meaning, as food for growth.
We are all here to harvest growth food. In the light of Eternity, localization is not necessarily separation, but a chance to delve in or simply contemplate a fragment of existence, which can only be truly understood in the light of the Whole, although, to us, the Whole can perhaps only be understood through each and every one of its parts.
(to be continued...)