Eternity is in love with the productions of time

In my mid-twenties, I took a trip to Florence for a couple of nights. It was the first time I had taken a flight to go on a first date. Amelia and I had been speaking long distance for a couple of weeks. She was from America, visiting Italy for a friend’s wedding on the outskirts of Florence, and I had never been to the city before.

We had an evening akin to the encounter in the first Before film, Before Sunrise, where the pair spontaneously decide to get off the train together in Vienna and wander around until daybreak. It was like a fleeting dream, circling the squares and venturing down the narrow, cobbled alleys of a place that is more like the world’s largest museum than a city.

Aside from my time with Amelia, I made a visit by myself to see The Statue of David in the Accademia Gallery. I spent a long while staring up at that incredible achievement. For much of the time, I was trying to figure out whether I was projecting awe onto the sculpture because of everything I'd heard about it, or if it was actually breaking some artistry perfection threshold in my brain. The veins running through his marble forearms appeared as soft as flesh, a perfect specimen for a nurse taking blood.

I was reminded of this experience when recently reading the following line by English poet, William Blake:

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

David by Michelangelo (1501-1504)

As is the ambition of Blake's work, the line flips traditional ideas. Eternity is often considered a timeless, perfect realm, superior to the decay and misery found in our time-bound world. But Blake challenges this. He suggests that due to the very limitations time offers, the eternal – God, infinity – is in awe of its productions – our experiences, struggles, joys, endurance, and creations.

Eternity finds a richness in what we produce, be it poems, paintings, performances or sculptures. And, in return, if these productions are infused with genuine brilliance, they gain an eternal quality. A masterpiece like the Statue of David will live on so long as the experiment of this universe runs, and perhaps even beyond this into eternity itself, whatever that might mean.

This contrast highlights how the finite nature of temporal existence allows the infinite to know itself. Just as Heaven requires Hell for progression, God requires humanity for its own expression and self-knowledge. Without us, there is no God, or no perception of God, which is the same thing.

This concept brings to mind a powerful line from the 2004 movie, Troy. Addressing the prisoner of war, Briseis, Achilles states:

The gods envy us. They envy us because we are mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.