Many people believe they brush up against it while altered by those special chemicals that inflame the senses until even the most mundane (fog beading on a windowpane, steam curling off a pot of water) swell and soak you up instead of the other way around. So a phrase like "the moment filled an eternity," meaning a momentary sensation absorbed me for longer than a moment, has come to seem cliché.
Although hyperexperience is pleasurable at times, pop-philosophy exhortations to "live in the moment" and "seize the day" exasperate me. These generally lazy statements don't acknowledge the debt our emotional vocabulary owes to time. Feelings may seem to be creatures of the moment, but words like nostalgia, worry, dread, anticipation, wistfulness, and hope show us the extent to which what we feel now is refracted through if and then.
I have glimpsed eternity of late while making tea at work. Every morning I pluck a light purple pocket of earl gray from the metal rack attached to the wall, drop it in my mug, open the fridge to my right, reach for a cool container of milk. As I flip the red hot water spigot and release a thin stream of steaming water, I feel the great turning disk of my day come to a halt. I imagine I hear the muffled clicking, like a lock's heartbeat, of this morning's actions falling exactly into the action of every other morning. And then I know that I am always, always here, at this counter, making one cup of tea forever that I will never drink and all the rest is a dream.
And I have been thinking of eternity in chorus where we sing music that is old -- or "early" as music written in Europe during the Renaissance and baroque periods is called -- comprising many parts that coil around each other in swift counterpoint. It is cooling, meant to be sung like a current slipping beneath a frozen stream, fine and clear. Because the multiple melodies move in different directions at once they sometimes undo each others' work, filling in the gaps that might otherwise catch a listener short. Single voices silver to the surface and then disappear back into the dense mesh of parts. Because the earlier music is more static harmonically, its expansion is spatial, opening onto wide fields of ice. And because the intervals and chords permitted are limited by what was considered consonant at that time (thirds were just becoming acceptable), because these pieces don't express emotion by varying dynamics or tempo but instead, like the mechanism of a clock, by perfectly and precisely integrating parts into a functioning whole, these songs may seem to lack the directional spine that shapes the classical and romantic music we are more familiar with.
If a Mozart aria presents a sonic narrative that evolves, modulates, and resolves like the phases of a moon or a love affair, a Palestrina mass stretches out like the sea at night, and notes shimmer across its face, tiny quivering panels of light suggesting the immensity of the water all around.
Singing this music in the context of its creation -- the Catholic Church -- I have come to think of the qualities of early music as not merely stylistic but also symbolic choices. The world of the Church is an eternity machine, created and completed in beauty to run until it runs out. The world of the enlightenment is a work in progress; we who inhabit it burst forward at times only to be slung back again by forces beyond our control.
The wonder is that these two worlds exist not only side by side but also within each other, that from the arcing shoreline we can look out onto a sea whose waves are always cresting and never break, and then turn around and walk back up the beach, towards the parking lot.
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