“Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river… it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire,” Wrote Louis Borges the Argentinian Poet. Time is the substance we are made of. Everyone is suspended between birth and death. Life is the span of time we are tarrying in this world. We fail often to be responsible to the time of our life. We as well as responsible bodies and persons in the Church flow in the river of time fully oblivious of the eternal responsibility that is the moving shadow of eternity. For there is prevalent a perpetual deferral to banality of evil. Such sin is making history in the Church. Man wanders in the desert of terra aesthetica and eternally circles the split that cuts through it. It is an alienation from man’s original historical space. In the work of art man risks losing not simply a piece of cultural wealth and not even the privileged expression of his creative energy: it is the very space of his world, in which he can find himself as man and as being capable of action and knowledge.
For Augustine finds “the drops of time are precious to him.” Our hearts were made for Yourself, O Lord, and they are restless – they will ever be restless – until they rest in You. Until that moment, the answer will always and ever be: “Not Yet!” There is always the temptation to defer to the future. It is an escape from the present. This escape is the alienation we live as fate. We are in the river, which is always moving. But the becoming takes place in the present as a process that creates our own lives. And the angel’s melancholy is the consciousness that has adopted alienation in the world; it is the nostalgia of a reality that can make it unreal. The image of the condition of man is unable to find tradition and the experience of time inherent in it, and he is no longer able to find his present space and loses his way in history’s linear time. Kafka is an author of our epoch who has most coherently assumed this task. Faced with man’s inability to appropriate his own historical presuppositions, he tried to turn this impossibility into the very soil on which man might recover himself. The angel of history in fact was there from the start, and the storm and his subsequent flight along the linear time of progress are nothing but an illusion he creates in the attempt to falsify his knowledge and to transform his perennial condition into an aim that is still to be attained. Fraz Kafka writes, “Only our concept of Time makes it possible for us to call the day of the Last Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.” For man it is always already the day of the Last Judgment: the Last Judgment is his normal historical condition, and only his fear of facing it creates the illusion that it is still to come. The goal is inaccessible not because it is too far in the future but because it is present here in front of us; but its presence is constitutive of man’s historicity, of his perennial lingering along a non-existent path, and of his inability to appropriate his own historical situation. In transforming man’s inability to exit his historical status, perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, past and future, into the very space in which he can take the original measure of his dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action. Man’s temptation is alienation from the responsibility of time to create the difference one is called to create, which is the duty of creating oneself in history. We are always tempted to live in illusion. Illusion of the Last which is nothing other than death. Time itself is for Augustine the shadow which is an illusion of eternity. The shadow play and its art continues. The only thing we can say is that art will not simply be able to leap beyond its shadow to climb over its destiny. Eternity calls at every moment of history of life to make the decision for eternity. Eternity calls at every moment of life to make life eternal.