...AN ETERNITY…
Stage 17 / Wednesday 13 May / From Salgues to Estaing / 21 km
Since yesterday I’ve reached a new department, the Aveyron. I now rush with surprising ease down the slope which leads from the hilltops. I move toward the little towns of Saint-Côme, then Espalion, then Estaing, all on the banks of the Lot Rive: each one gets prettier. Gosh! After the empty and austere countryside of Aubrac, it’s like descending from the sky to find again the Promised Land: I feel a new lightness, like floating in ecstasy, and I’d like this feeling of rapture to last… into eternity!
This lightening of the body makes me imagine that I am only a “glorified” body which has been emptied of its heaviness and whose envelope shines with happiness. I almost believe that I am a Moses or Elijah descending still transfigured from Mt Tabor. Meanwhile, Jesus has gone to bring Pierre, James and John back to the other disciples, to then go and suffer his destiny in Jerusalem (see details in the gospels of Mathew 17, Mark, or Luke 9.) For a moment, I’d like it to last forever, this feeling of immortality… And the next instant I tell myself that spending eternity only in Estaing might not be so great. When I’ve seen everything there myriad times I might become bored … to death!
My body, you are surely mortal, though constituted of elements solar in origin and constantly self-renewing! Yes, my material envelope will completely disappear. But all the elements that transit through it today, and which will turn to dust once I am in the earth, will subsist… at least until the cosmological end of the universe, if there is such an end. “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed,” repeated Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier [otherwise simply known as … Lavoisier]. Did he still believe it just before they cut off his head? He, the genial scholar, lost his life at the guillotine during a pitiless revolution that found him guilty for having bought a title of nobility …
Now, the awareness I have of myself doesn’t seem to get older: might it know how to escape from aging? Will it subsist? I am not conscious of having existed before my birth. But in any case, from adolescence onward, it was certainly the same me, no one else, that I have always felt living in my body. My conscience, this intimate and part of myself freed from my senses, is it indestructible? Incapable of remembering the “before” (my birth), will it be able to at least remember the after (my life) for a … half eternity? Oh dream of a “forever!” with what pride and pretentious narcissism are you clothed? I know very well that apart from a few people very close to me, and even though, for a limited time, the impact of my death on the scale of the universe will not be worth more than a grain of sand removed from the Sahara desert.
Material, immaterial, life, death, immortality, yesterday, today, tomorrow, temporal, timeless … I am obsessed with all these words bumping into each other, and I tell myself that I may well spend eternity deciding their insignificance. Eternal life, paradisiacal promise that I’ve been reflecting on since my earliest childhood, what will you render eternal in me? And what if my death simply makes me rejoin the void of my “before birth.” Puff, the candle burns down, no more wax nor flame … No more conscience, nothing more … And if that’s it, why fear a death where one feels absolutely nothing, since nothing subsists.
And in any case, if there is eternal life, that is what I intimately wish for everyone, believers and infidels. There are even bad people that I can’t help loving and that I would like to find again in the great beyond, if only to understand who or what made them bad! I would see myself spending a good piece of eternity accompanying Napoleon to better understand what made him tick, this tyrant thirsting for execrable conquests …
Yes, what to make of an exclusive individual salvation? I would prefer everything rather than nothing, all rather than just a few. Now, the Christian faith doesn’t forbid that which it calls the reversibility of merits. Okay, Napoleon, if I want to see you in heaven and better gage your size and exploits, I’d better start praying for you! Ah, look what’s coming back to tickle me: “Monday morning, the emperor, his wife, and the little prince, etc.” Harping on the same subject, it’s unending, but I refuse to have nothing but that in eternity!
