Canter Bridge

At times the power of a work remains latent until circumstances arrange themselves in such a way that it seems written for this moment. Such is the potency of the extended rumination that we call Ecclesiastes, after the odd name given to the presenting speaker. Worn-out moderns and post-moderns born into despair find in its pages a script of their own mind’s journey.

It is possible to argue that despair is a habit of the mind that is as often chosen as not. It aligns conveniently with a set of facts as we live them when the overarching biblical narrative of hope either no longer resonates in our hearts or runs too ruthlessly against the grain of our temperament to be embraced. ‘Qohelet’, the book’s ‘convener’, speaks our language, knows the dark night of this soul, rehearses with unusual accuracy the rhythm of our heart.

‘There is a time’, he tells us, ‘for everything’.

‘There is a season for every matter under heaven’.

Then, in a compelling litany of life’s adventures that maintains the delicate equilibrium between beauty and despair:

A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

Qohelet’s lines come to us as a splendid articulation of what our own scars remind us is true. Yet beauty haunts the balance of the lines, for we have thrilled to plant and—even—to know the hubris and frisson of tearing down. When one has both embraced and refrained, it is impossible to fault this knowing poet.

This is my life, the reader feels. These are lessons I have learned.

I too reside on uncertain terms with the legacy of the balance and its deep capacity for despair. Is the finality of this equilibrium, too, a chasing after the wind, the errand of fools? Is this all that remains under the sun?

It is no easy thing to live, as Qohelet puts it, ‘with eternity in our hearts’. We are damned to know the beauty embedded in patterns and truths that under this burning sun are vanity of vanities. We cannot easily imbibe the lie that this is all right, that the dark night will take away the ache. It is as though eternity has innoculated us against the convenient possiblity of inuring ourselves completely to that restless glory that lives within, hemmed in by meaninglessness, burnt raw under the sun, pulsing in its quest to probe still deeper and find life. Determined for significance.