Embers and Stars: Erazim Kohák
For the truth, for all its complexity, is in a sense utterly simple, as simple as the embers and the stars. We fear unknowing, yet the greater danger may well be that of forgetting, of losing sight of the starry heaven and the moral law, dismissing the truth because it seems so naïvely simple. That is why it seems to me so urgent that philosophy should ever return down the long-abandoned wagon road amid the new growth, not to speculate but to see, hear, and know that there still is night, star-bright and all-reconciling, and that there is dawn, pale over Barrett Mountain, a world which still is God’s, not man’s, a world where the human can be a dweller at peace with himself, his world, and his God. Though it cannot remain there, philosophy must ever return down the wagon road, in the golden glow of the autumn. Not to find a new truth. The reason is far more modest: lest we forget.
Once more it is autumn, when the sunlight grows golden with the turning leaves and the air heavy with fruition and decay. Somewhere the grapes grow rich on the vine. The leaves of the red maple, whose color all summer anticipated the fall, grow tan; the fresh pine straw softly blankets the corner of memories beneath the white pines. Around the clearing the forest floor lights up with the gold of freshly fallen leaves; the river bed is bright with them beneath the clear water.
How many autumns since the agonized cry with which humans protest the unacceptability of the inevitable? It is vain to count. Humans must ever make peace with the ending of a life, the parting of the loved, with the raccoon wasted on the pavement, struck down by an unheeding motorist. The anguished cry of a child’s futile love focuses the helplessness of love in face of the flow of time no less than the agony of the woman who in vain would enfold with the angel’s wings of her love the man plummeting to his death, sixteen stories below, on the refuse-stained concrete of the alley. That aching love is so human—and so vain in the order of time. The fulfillment of life cannot be in its future. That future is always an end. We know that: we ought not to wonder that something perishes. We hurt when we forget that the point of life is not that it should last forever. Its overlooked wonder is that once it was; there once was a man, there once was a raccoon. That is the miracle, that is the point.
The altar hangings on the Eve of All Saints’ are not purple, the color of mourning. They are richly, lovingly embroidered, in a pattern of deep joy. All Saints’ is not a day to grieve for all who have died. It is a day to rejoice in all who have lived. The fulfillment of time is not where we seek it in vain, in its endless future. It is where we find it, in its perennially present eternity.
Kohák, Erazim. The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (p. 218). The University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Once more it is autumn, when the sunlight grows golden with the turning leaves and the air heavy with fruition and decay. Somewhere the grapes grow rich on the vine. The leaves of the red maple, whose color all summer anticipated the fall, grow tan; the fresh pine straw softly blankets the corner of memories beneath the white pines. Around the clearing the forest floor lights up with the gold of freshly fallen leaves; the river bed is bright with them beneath the clear water.
How many autumns since the agonized cry with which humans protest the unacceptability of the inevitable? It is vain to count. Humans must ever make peace with the ending of a life, the parting of the loved, with the raccoon wasted on the pavement, struck down by an unheeding motorist. The anguished cry of a child’s futile love focuses the helplessness of love in face of the flow of time no less than the agony of the woman who in vain would enfold with the angel’s wings of her love the man plummeting to his death, sixteen stories below, on the refuse-stained concrete of the alley. That aching love is so human—and so vain in the order of time. The fulfillment of life cannot be in its future. That future is always an end. We know that: we ought not to wonder that something perishes. We hurt when we forget that the point of life is not that it should last forever. Its overlooked wonder is that once it was; there once was a man, there once was a raccoon. That is the miracle, that is the point.
The altar hangings on the Eve of All Saints’ are not purple, the color of mourning. They are richly, lovingly embroidered, in a pattern of deep joy. All Saints’ is not a day to grieve for all who have died. It is a day to rejoice in all who have lived. The fulfillment of time is not where we seek it in vain, in its endless future. It is where we find it, in its perennially present eternity.
Kohák, Erazim. The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (p. 218). The University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.