And Time Stood Still

 "And time stood still...." [Link]

Life revolves around peculiar moments that stand in perfect stillness, and yet in that stillness, they influence the rest of life.  Such moments remain with us, and remain with the full import and potency of their striking epiphane and truth.  It's T. S. Eliot's "still point of the turning world."

Yes.  I remember intensely significant moments where time stood still -- but stood neither in stasis nor in movement.  The center scarcely moves -- the center of a turning wheel, and while the outer edge spins at a furiously ignorant pace, the center remains a tranquil point of potency and significance, even if we can't articulate the significance of the moment.

It's the center of the dance, a moment revolving within time, a moment between lovers' eyes, a moment not captured by the lovers but a moment in which they are captured.  They shall forever not live outside it.

It is a place only arrived at by all your past conspiring to bring you into it, and it is a place from which the future shall forever grow.  It's the "eternal moment" that the Romantic poets wrote of.  It's that moment which Peter Ibbeston enters when he understands the Duchess of Towers is his childhood love, Mimsy [Link].  Cupid finds his lost Psyche and wakes her with a kiss.  Pygmalion kisses Galatea as she transforms from cold, immovable stone into warm, living flesh.  And life is never the same.  From that still moment of waking, both Mimsy and Peter, Cupid and Psyche, Pygmalion and Galatea will move through their lives -- and exist both within that moment and within the future that the moment will continually unfold before them.

Yet -- and because -- it is life, we move on from that moment, for good or ill.  The moment stands still through it all, but its stillness moves in us.  Its potency is seen in how it drives our hearts to places we would otherwise never comprehend.  Yet even as it is moving us, we never quite lose sight of the moment.

The quiet moment stands with a truth, with a force that may not be denied -- or if denied, only dishonestly.  This has not been put more succinctly than by Eliot in Burnt Norton:

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, 
   there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not 
   call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither 
   movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the 
   point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only 
   the dance.

And what if you should miss the vital moment? What if you should make some other choice just then? What if Galatea should not love in return -- what is there?  Eliot again:

What might have been is an abstraction 
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

Footfalls echo in the rose garden we never entered.  The ghosts of a life we did not choose move over the dead leaves.  The words we never spoke perpetually whisper in us.  The ghosts of two lovers who never embraced in complete understanding haunt our mind.

The danger is that such moments are pregnant with the lasting realities of life and love, loaded with all of their tragedy and their comedy.  That is why, as Sheldon Vanauken put it, "Honesty is better than any easy comfort." The still moment dwells only in honesty, in truth, no matter the outcome, no matter whether love is fulfilled or unrequited. Galatea may love Pygmalion -- or she may leave him.  And -- there are the masks of Comedy and Tragedy in Gerome's painting.

Pygmalion and Galatea. Gerome, c. 1890

 

In the midst of our best moments, we'll recall a truth left unspoken for fear of an outcome, and a lost moment parades before our mind.  And yet...in the midst of our worst moments, the ever-present still moment in which we chose a truth and received a gift of love presses us toward the center and relieves the spinning of peripheral and distracted life.

As the song says, you can try to repair the past.  You can try to become someone you're not.  Those attempts can't last. Gatsby tried: you can't get the past back.  Nevertheless -- here, there, always -- a certain eternal moment in the past stands, still and tranquil, within every present and future moment.

The life we chose.  The life we did not choose.  Both remain within the still moment -- a moment that remains forever "the still point of the turning world."  And eternity is merely that: a moment in time, standing still, shaping all the rest of time.