Under the Aspect of Eternity

An Excerpt of "Transcendence for Beginners" by Clare Carlisle

Editors note: When NYRB sent me this book, I was totally blown away by it. Carlisle is a brilliant and thoughtful philosopher; a biographer of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot who manages to write about the great themes with deep care and attention, and in a way that is fresh and accessible. What follows is a small meditation on the relationship between writing and life. If you are a fan of the kind of thing we publish here, Transcendence for Beginners is well worth the purchase.

---

Consider this childhood memory. When I was a little girl, before I started school, my mother taught me to write. First I learned to write the alphabet with a pencil on lined paper. Letters were a mixture of curved and straight lines. An ‘a’ was quite difficult: you began to draw a circle—but you didn’t make it a whole circle—and then you put a straight vertical line on the right-hand side of it. ‘b’ was a tall letter, made from a circle and a vertical line twice the height of the ‘a,’ on the left side. When I wrote my name, I had to draw a ‘C’ as tall as a ‘b.’ The lined paper helped me get the proportions right. My mother’s writing was round, clear, flowing, very beautiful. She could join all the letters in each word together. I tried to make my letters more beautiful, like hers. I tried hard not to make any mistakes.

At some point in primary school the daily act of writing became so habitual that I no longer thought about it. Even as a philosophy student and, eventually, a professional philosopher, I hardly paused to wonder, what is writing? What are we doing when we write?

Recollecting the experience of learning to write helps to lift this veil of habit. When I bring my attention back to writing, I discover that in some ways it resembles life. Writing a text means drawing a certain line on a page; living a life means drawing a certain line through the world. These lines move through space and through time.

A path seems a fitting metaphor for writing as well as for life. In each case you must find or make a path through terrain that is teeming with possibilities. And yet the path of writing, like the path of life, can quickly acquire a trajectory that feels irresistible, even necessary. Often your path is formed by following others who have gone before you. Sometimes it is formed by choices—a decision to go this way, not that way. Every path is a combination of following and choosing, and choosing whom to follow, and following others’ choices. Every path is some combination of finding and making.

Life is relational, and so is writing. It is the relationships between words, and then between sentences, that make a meaningful text. And in writing as in life, linearity combines with complexity. On the one hand, the line of writing is unidirectional. It only moves forwards. On the other hand—yet at the same time—it loops, folds, gathers, knots, stitches itself together, forming layers. For example, a recurring metaphor, a rhyme, or a repeated word tacks one point in the line to another. Life shares this double character. It flows irrevocably in one direction: sooner or later (it’s taken me many years) we learn that we cannot travel back in time. Yet our experience continually folds back and loops forward—in memory, in habit, in the deliberate repetitions of practice and ritual, in all the moods of anticipation, and in all the moods of looking back.

The line of writing, like the line of living, has an intermittent and rhythmic quality. On paper there are spaces between words; in our bodies there are spaces between breaths, between heartbeats, between footsteps. In consciousness there are longer intermittencies of sleeping and waking, and irregular intermittencies as attention lapses and returns. Underlying these stops and starts is a flow, such as the flow of blood through the body, and the flow of thought—unconscious as well as conscious—that underlies the act of writing. A piece of writing, like a living being, has rhythm, and its rhythm is essential to its structure (how it moves) and its texture (how it feels).

Inseparable from this rhythm is temporality. As soon as a text comes into being it is there all at once on the page. Yet writing and reading are active, imaginative experiences that unfold in time, bringing the text to life and sustaining it in existence—just as a footpath through the countryside is formed and renewed by each person or animal who walks along it. Likewise, we can distinguish these two aspects of a human life: it is a dynamic shape unfolding moment by moment, and it can be conceived as a whole. Then it transcends the flow of time. Indeed, this is an image of time, like an aerial view of a great river from its source to the sea, seen from miles above the earth—‘under the aspect of eternity,’ as Spinoza put it. When we imagine it this way, it becomes quite beautiful. A whole life, moving through the world from its source to its end: unique, slender, searching. A God looking down on it may well be moved to love—and also, perhaps, to tears.

Pre-order Transcendence for Beginners here.

This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.