When we are disappointed by a pleasure which we have been expecting and which comes, the disappointment is because we were expecting the future. And as soon as it is there, it is the present. We want the future to be there without ceasing to be the future. This is an absurdity of which eternity alone is the cure (66).
As a kid, I used to look forward to the autumn with almost visible excitement. Every fall, we headed off for the closest thing to a vacation we ever had: a week-long religious festival that included enough relatively free time to make it feel like vacation. It meant missing school, which made it all the better, and given the fact that we saved all year for the one week, the relative affluence I experienced made it seem like Christmas every day. Yet every year, a strange melancholy overtook me ever so briefly at the beginning: it had finally arrived, and while I was thrilled about that, I also knew that I had nothing else to look forward to afterward.
Yet I think Weil is talking about more than the mere excitement of being in a metaphorical candy store. Underneath this longing for the future, this “absurdity which eternity alone is the cure,” is a very serious attempt to sketch out what some have described as a hint of the beyond, or as Peter Berger might have called it, a rumor of angels. That sense of never being fulfilled is a hint, Catholic writer Peter Kreeft argues, that there is something more to fulfill it.
Photo by danmoyle