Topic
Eternity in this collection is where death and love converge. Seneca's birthday-of-eternity frames the collection's central movement: what appears to be an ending is, in his account, a transition into a different order of time. Franklin's the-sooner-we-die-the-longer-we-shall-be-immortal is the mathematical version of the same argument, delivered with characteristic lightness. Mother Teresa's bond-of-love-unbroken-for-all-eternity is the theological statement. Stael-Holstein's love-as-emblem-of-eternity connects the two primary threads: love and death are both conditions that efface all notion of time, that erase the memory of beginning and the fear of ending. The anonymous life-is-a-dream-walking-death-is-a-going-home is the folk equivalent of Seneca. Butler's memorial-as-immortality places eternity in human hands: the dead live as long as they are remembered. What the collection argues is that eternity is not a theological category for most of these writers but an experiential one — the quality of being fully absorbed in something that transcends the ordinary flow of time.
Never is an awfully long time.