Today I’m still (barely) on the left side of 40, and bearing apologies for being away too long. “Life” can sometimes be enough to put out the creative spark\u2014but never permanently: I want to believe that eternity in God’s presence will be full of creation. Eternity without creation would be absolutely dull.<\/p>\n
On this birthday,\u00a0 I am remembering the following blurb from David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published The Pale King <\/em>and am thankful to Andrew Sullivan and The Dish<\/em> for introducing me to it:<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe it\u2019s not metaphysics. Maybe it\u2019s existential. I\u2019m talking about the individual U.S. citizen\u2019s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we\u2019ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it\u2019s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it\u2019s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than \u2018die,\u2019 \u2018pass away,\u2019 the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday\u2014 \u2026<\/p>\n Today I’m still (barely) on the left side of 40, and bearing apologies for being away too long. “Life” can sometimes be enough to put out the creative spark\u2014but never permanently: I want to believe that eternity in God’s presence will be full of creation. Eternity without creation would be absolutely dull. On this birthday,\u00a0…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":461,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2275,2207],"tags":[593,2277,1135,2276],"class_list":["post-5409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aging","category-existententialism","tag-andrew-sullivan","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-the-dish","tag-the-pale-king"],"yoast_head":"\n