Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night. In this way transience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us.
All of our time disappears on us. This is an incredible fact. You are so knitted into a day. You are within it; the day is as close as your skin. It is around your eyes; it is inside your mind. The day moves you, often it can weigh you down; or again it can raise you up. Yet the amazing fact is, this day vanishes. When you look behind you, you do not see your past standing there in a series of day shapes. You cannot wander back through the gallery of your past. Your days have disappeared silently and forever. Your future time has not arrived yet. The only ground of time is the present moment.
In our culture, we place a great and worthy emphasis on the importance and sacredness of experience. In other words, what you think, believe, or feel remains a fantasy if it does not actually become part of the fabric of your experience. Experience is the touchstone of verification, credibility, and deep intimacy. Yet the future of every experience is its disappearance. This raises a fascinating question: Is there a place where our vanished days secretly gather? As a medieval mystic asked, Where does the light go when the candle is blown out? I believe that there is a place where our vanished days secretly gather. The name of that place is memory.
MEMORY: WHERE OUR VANISHED DAYS SECRETLY GATHER
Memory is one of the most beautiful realities of the soul. Since the body itself is so linked into the visual sense it often does not recognize memory as the place where the past is gathered. The most powerful image of memory is the tree. I remember seeing once at the Museum of Natural History in London a sliver of the diameter of a giant redwood from California. This tree’s memory reached back to about the fifth century. The memory rings within the diameter of the tree had little white flags at different points documenting the age of the particular memory ring. The first one was St. Colmcille going to Iona in the sixth century, then up along the Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on up to the twentieth century. This giant redwood had lived through fourteen or fifteen centuries of time. Its great memory had unfolded all that time within the texture of its timber.
In the classical tradition, the most beautiful evocation of the power, presence, and riches of memory is in book 10 of St. Augustine’s confession. The following passage is splendid in its portrayal of the inner world.
Great is the power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God, a spreading limitless room within me. Who can reach its uttermost depth? Yet it is a faculty of soul and belongs to my nature. In fact I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself but where can the part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside itself and not within? As this question struck I was overcome with wonder and almost stupor. Here are men going afar to marvel at the heights of the mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movement of the stars, yet leaving themselves, unnoticed and not seeing it as marvelous that when I spoke of all these things, I did not see them with my eyes, yet I could not have spoken of them unless these mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and the ocean of which I have heard, had been inwardly present to my sight: in my memory, yet with the same vast spaces between them as if I saw them outside me.
One of the great poverties of our modern culture of rapidity, stress, and externality is that there is so little attention to memory. The computer industry has hijacked the notion of memory. To say that computers have memory is false. A computer has storage and recall. Human memory is, however, more refined, sacred, and personal. Memory has its own inner selectivity and depth. Human memory is an inner temple of feeling and sensibility. Within that temple different experiences are grouped according to their particular feeling and shape. Our time suffers from a great amnesia. The American philosopher Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The beauty and invitation of old age offer a time of silence and solitude for a visit to the house of your inner memory. You can revisit all of your past. Your soul is the place where your memory lives. Since linear time vanishes, everything depends on memory. In other words, our time comes in yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows. Yet there is another place within us that lives in eternal time. That place is called the soul. The soul, therefore, lives mainly in the mode of eternity. This means that as things happen in your yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows and fall away with transience, they fall and are caught and held by the net of the eternal in your soul. There they are gathered, preserved, and minded for you. Levinas says, “Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.” Consequently, as your body ages and gets weaker, your soul is in fact getting richer, deeper, and stronger. With time your soul grows more sure of itself; the natural light within it increases and brightens. There is a beautiful poem by the wonderful Czeslaw Milosz on old age called “A New Province.” This is the last verse:
I would prefer to be able to say: “I am satiated,
What is given to taste in this life, I have tasted.”
But I am like someone in a window who draws aside a curtain
To look at a feast he does not comprehend.
TÍR NA N-ÓG: THE LAND OF YOUTH
The Celtic tradition had a wonderful sense of the way eternal time is woven through our human time. There is the lovely story of Oisín, who was one of the Fianna, a band of Celtic warriors. He was tempted to visit the land called Tír na n-Óg, which is the land of eternal youth, where the good people, the fairy people, lived. Oisín went off with them, and for a long, long time he lived happily there with his woman, Niamh Cinn Oir, known as Niamh of the golden hair. The time seemed so short to him, being a time of great joy. The quality of our experience always determines the actual rhythm of time. When you are in pain, every moment slows down until it resembles a week. When you are happy and really enjoying your life, time flies. Oisin’s time passed really quickly in the land of Tír na n-Óg. Then his longing for his old life began to gnaw. He began to wonder how the Fianna were, and what was happening in Ireland. He began to long for home, the land of Éire. The fairy people discouraged him because they knew that as a former inhabitant of mortal and linear time, he would be in danger of getting lost there forever. Nevertheless, he decided to return. They gave him a beautiful white horse and told him never to dismount. If he did, he would be lost. He came on the great white horse back to the land of Ireland. Greater loneliness awaited him when he discovered that he had been gone for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Fianna had disappeared. He consoled himself by visiting their old hunting sites and the places where they had feasted, sung, recited old stories, and achieved great feats of valor. In the meantime, Christianity had come to Ireland. When Oisín was riding around on his white horse, he saw a group of men failing as they attempted to raise a big rock to build a church. Being a warrior, he had wonderful strength, and he looked at them and longed to help them; but he knew he dare not dismount from the horse; if he did, he was lost. He watched them from a distance for a while, then he rode nearer. He could not resist any longer. He took his foot out of the stirrup and reached under the rock to raise it up for them, but as soon as he did, the girth broke, the saddle turned over, and Oisín hit the ground. The very moment hé hit the land of Ireland, he became a feeble, wrinkled old man. This is a wonderful story to show the coexistence of the two levels of time. If you broke the threshold that the fairies observed between these two levels of time, you ended up stranded in mortal, linear time. The destination of human time is death. Eternal time is unbroken presence.