Meaning and Eternal Life
An interesting notion, from Patrick Lee Miller:
Try to imagine Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing to a song of infinite length. Their technique would remain as dazzling as the talent of the resurrected Lou Gehrig, and it is just as tempting to fantasize about them dancing forever as it is to imagine him playing his last game one more inning, and then another…but what was most valuable in their art, as in his play, would then be lost. Without a sense of the end, and thus of the shape of their movements, the beauty and drama they achieved in finite time would become the infinite and thus meaningless repetition of technique; or, if eternity be imagined as all moments gathered together, this finite beauty and drama would become the absurdity of every move executed at once, and so on for every activity we know. Life itself, as the activity of activities, requires the finitude imposed on it ultimately by death to preserve its meaning.
… but I don’t buy it. I think that Mr Miller is trying to make the best of a bad situation, and I applaud him for it. And there is a certain gravity that attends the preoccupations of the doomed. But, seriously, if we could find a way to cheat death, I’m sure we could find a way to introduce meaning into our absurdly elongated lives.
(via Andrew Sullivan)
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