Because our mode of existence is marked above all things by transience and flux, we find ourselves constantly fetishizing the infinite and the eternal. In spite of our limited experience of the temporal, or perhaps because of it, we are always trying to access and embrace what, by necessity, cannot exist: the infinity of forms.
Our romantic attachment to the infinite and the eternal is, ultimately, a life affirming yearning. It is a desire for an illusory arcana of boundlessness, vindication, and clarity. In the infinite order of things, nothing escapes notice and any infinite number of things becomes infinitely, unequivocally alive and worthy of attention.
In endowing phenomena and fragments of lived experience with the metaphysical density of poetic symbolism we seek to capture a degree of that boundlessness, and in so doing expose the finite to the possibility of the infinite. Our absorption with the infinite is, in Kahlil Gibran’s words, a symptom of ‘life’s longing for itself’. To his creative credit, the British Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) spent much of his time in what he poetically termed ‘the regions of eternity’.
Wordsworth was lovingly preoccupied with the intersection between the human soul and its natural provenance. Wordsworth was fluent in what Rilke later termed the ability to ‘seek the depths of things’. He found magic, and a suggestion of infinity’s inner workings, in the wing of a butterfly or the contours of a fallen leaf. He was single-mindedly absorbed with the minutiae of the natural world, where he found living manifestations of the wonder at the heart of existence. He marveled at nature, a world where ‘the least of things seemed infinite’.
Wordsworth felt awe, and a sense of delightful terror, at what he saw when he peered beyond the finite surfaces of forms:
And i have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense subline of something far more interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
There is something of an autobiographical tone to some of his musings, where he holds up a mirror to his own longing to commune with the infinite:
There I beheld the emblem of a mind that feeds upon infinity, that broods over the dark abyss, intent to hear its voices issuing forth to silent light in one continuous stream…
Wordsworth makes a compelling case for inviting the unknown into our lives, and for living the questions. He gently urges us to explore the boundaries of life’s most perplexing questions, without losing ourselves in them:
Thus thoughts and things in the self-haunting spirit learned to take more rational proportions; mystery, the incumbent mystery of sense and soul, of life and death, time and eternity
He ultimately recognizes that he is a ‘transitory being’, living a brief moment in the dance of time, but that this cheapened his experience not a single bit:
Our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence; truths that wake, to perish never
While he was ever seeking out what he called ‘one of those heavenly days that cannot die’, he ultimately acknowledges that transience is woven into our veins:
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid when her long life hath reached its final day: men are we, and must grieve when even the shade of that which once was great is passed away
These poetic fragments are borrowed from my copy of the Penguin Classic’s William Wordsworth: Selected Poems.
