Eternity
One winter, when I was in elementary school, my family and I were home, feeling warm and toasty despite the bitterness outside. In the mood for a flick, one of us had rented the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray. The main character is Phil Connors, a meteorologist assigned to cover the annual Groundhog Day celebration in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Connors hates the assignment (how can a lowly groundhog who also happens to be named Phil predict the weather any better than him?!), and to add salt to the wound, he gets the weather report wrong. Despite Connors' prediction of good weather, a massive blizzard hits, shutting down all travel to or from Punxsutawney. As Connors soon finds out, however, the weather is the least of his worries.
Connors wakes up the next morning... to Groundhog Day. Indeed, Mr. Connors has found himself in a time loop, a horrifying state of existence wherein the same day repeats itself over and over again, with no end in sight. Connors starts off confused and bewildered, as one might naturally be. He soon realizes the true extent of his predicament, and he decides to take advantage of it. No matter what he does each day, he always wakes up to the same morning, and the day proceeds as if nothing had happened. Connors seduces women, steals money, drives drunk and ends up in jail—one day, Connors even decides to steal Punxsutawney Phil, culminating in a high-speed police chase that ends up killing both himself and the groundhog. Even following death, Connors wakes up at 6 o'clock the next morning to the same Groundhog Day, the world once again oblivious to his actions. Growing increasingly depressed, Connors tries desperately to end the time loop, repeatedly committing suicide to no avail.
Groundhog Day is a comedy, but its premise is very dark. In the film, Connors eventually does break the time loop, but only after a massive introspective reprioritization of his core life values. Harold Ramis, the film's director, estimates that Connors probably spent thirty to forty years in the time loop. Thirty to forty years. According to the CIA World Factbook, the world's life expectancy at birth is 68.7 years. The length of time Phil Connors experienced during his fictional time loop was equivalent to half of the average human's total time on Earth, and in that time, he had no one to talk to about the situation—he was, without a doubt, the loneliest man on Earth. What would Connors have done if he could never have broken the time loop? How would one cope with that kind of existence?
There are seven billion human beings on planet Earth. That's seven billion hearts beating in time. Thousands of new hearts beating for the first time each day, thousands of old hearts beating for the last. As all seven billion of us stumble about our lives on this rocky planet, we are all aware that the time we have is limited. No matter what, every single one of those seven billion hearts will stop beating one day. It's a matter of when. This is a part of ourselves that all of us share. In the end (literally), we all find ourselves in the same life situation. In this sense, we are never lonely. In the case of Phil Connors, however, his loneliness was profound because he had no one to share his life situation, his entire state of existence. What's more, there was no escape—not even death.
Consider, for a minute, hell. Hell is—unequivocally—the most terrifying concept ever conceived. It is frequently described as a place of conscious, eternal torment. The prime example is a pit of fire, but I like to think of hell as darkness. Envision yourself as Phil Connors, waking up each day to the same day, with no end in sight to this awful loop. However, rather than waking each day to a snowy Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, you wake up to nothing—a deep, dark, black abyss, devoid of anything other than your body. The darkness (or otherwise the fire) is really not the scary part. It's the eternity. No matter what you do, you will always be in this place, with nothing but memories of the life you lived.
In life, everything is temporary. Sad times will always pass away eventually, as will happy times; even life itself will not last forever. As Abraham Lincoln once revered: and this, too, shall pass away. Because of this, it is difficult for us to really even begin to comprehend this concept of eternity. The length of eternity is not one lifetime, nor is it two or ten or a thousand lifetimes. Millions and billions and trillions of years can pass by, but eternity is still millions and billions and trillions of years longer. Put someone in solitary confinement on Earth for just one year and mental health disorders start cropping up. An eternity of torment sounds almost too fantastically nightmarish. Words alone really cannot describe its true extent.
Consider, now, eternal life. In a sense, Phil Connors had eternal life: even after dying innumerable times, he continued to live. Another form of eternal life is immortality, in which one can never die. Immortality can also be an immensely scary idea. In the last book of Fablehaven, a children's fantasy series written by Brandon Mull, the main characters are tasked to rescue the five Eternals—a group of humans who have been granted near-immortality as a means for protecting Zzyzx, a prison for demons. Zzyzx can only be opened if all five Eternals are killed, and the Eternals can only be killed by phoenix fire, a unicorn horn, dragon breath—something magic-related. Fablehaven is set in the real world, so this kind of stuff is extremely difficult to come across. One man is on a quest to open Zzyzx for misguided reasons, and the main characters need to rescue and hide the five Eternals before their enemy gets the chance to kill them. During their quest, the main characters locate one of the Eternals, but when they meet him, they find that he is immensely disillusioned. After centuries of immortality, everyone he once knew and grew close to—his family, friends, loved ones—have all long passed away. The Eternal reveals that he wants to die. With nothing left to live for, he could not care less about the demon prison. His refusal to be rescued leads to his death and a major setback for the heroes of the story.
The story of this Eternal is exactly the story which makes immortality seem terrifying as well. What if you were given the "gift" of immortality right here, right now? It would seem pretty fun at first, I guess. Throw in invincibility and you could jump off the Empire State Building and live to tell the tale. However, there's a catch: you are the only person in the world who is immortal. Once you become immortal, the terms "soon" and "long ago" become meaningless to you. A day is the same fraction of your life as a century. Your mother and your father, your brothers and your sisters, your spouses and your children—they will all be with you within their own lifetimes, but as you age on—50 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, 100,000 years—all of them will be nothing but a pleasant memory from many years ago as you watch people fighting, countries crumbling, leaders rising, scientists discovering. You might make new friends, new loved ones, but in time, they too will be nothing but a memory. Perhaps one day, immeasurable years in the future, you will find that the Sun has gone through its stellar life cycle and exploded, destroying planet Earth in the process. Perhaps when that day comes, humankind will have become so technologically advanced that they will have all managed to leave the Earth safely and colonize a different planet in another solar system. Perhaps one day, the memory of Earth will be nothing but a single chapter in the history of man. And what, then, of your mother and your father? Of your brothers and your sisters? Your spouses and your children? No one else will ever remember who they were or that they ever existed. And then perhaps one day, you live to see the heat death of the universe, when the universe has expanded so far apart that the particles are too far apart to generate any kind of energy—when the entire universe has reached thermodynamic equilibrium. There will be darkness. And it will last for eternity. Suddenly, immortality doesn't sound so much different from hell.
Perhaps it is time for us to realize and appreciate collectively as one human race that the time we have on Earth is limited. Why waste our time caught in ideological impasses, when we could instead work together to reach understandings, to make the world a better place for the humans that come after us? Why waste our time being sad, when this, too, shall pass away? Be thankful that we are not Mr. Phil Connors, stuck in an ever-repeating time loop, with no end in sight. Be grateful that we are not an Eternal. And above all else, in the time that you have: be happy!
Connors wakes up the next morning... to Groundhog Day. Indeed, Mr. Connors has found himself in a time loop, a horrifying state of existence wherein the same day repeats itself over and over again, with no end in sight. Connors starts off confused and bewildered, as one might naturally be. He soon realizes the true extent of his predicament, and he decides to take advantage of it. No matter what he does each day, he always wakes up to the same morning, and the day proceeds as if nothing had happened. Connors seduces women, steals money, drives drunk and ends up in jail—one day, Connors even decides to steal Punxsutawney Phil, culminating in a high-speed police chase that ends up killing both himself and the groundhog. Even following death, Connors wakes up at 6 o'clock the next morning to the same Groundhog Day, the world once again oblivious to his actions. Growing increasingly depressed, Connors tries desperately to end the time loop, repeatedly committing suicide to no avail.
Groundhog Day is a comedy, but its premise is very dark. In the film, Connors eventually does break the time loop, but only after a massive introspective reprioritization of his core life values. Harold Ramis, the film's director, estimates that Connors probably spent thirty to forty years in the time loop. Thirty to forty years. According to the CIA World Factbook, the world's life expectancy at birth is 68.7 years. The length of time Phil Connors experienced during his fictional time loop was equivalent to half of the average human's total time on Earth, and in that time, he had no one to talk to about the situation—he was, without a doubt, the loneliest man on Earth. What would Connors have done if he could never have broken the time loop? How would one cope with that kind of existence?
There are seven billion human beings on planet Earth. That's seven billion hearts beating in time. Thousands of new hearts beating for the first time each day, thousands of old hearts beating for the last. As all seven billion of us stumble about our lives on this rocky planet, we are all aware that the time we have is limited. No matter what, every single one of those seven billion hearts will stop beating one day. It's a matter of when. This is a part of ourselves that all of us share. In the end (literally), we all find ourselves in the same life situation. In this sense, we are never lonely. In the case of Phil Connors, however, his loneliness was profound because he had no one to share his life situation, his entire state of existence. What's more, there was no escape—not even death.
Consider, for a minute, hell. Hell is—unequivocally—the most terrifying concept ever conceived. It is frequently described as a place of conscious, eternal torment. The prime example is a pit of fire, but I like to think of hell as darkness. Envision yourself as Phil Connors, waking up each day to the same day, with no end in sight to this awful loop. However, rather than waking each day to a snowy Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, you wake up to nothing—a deep, dark, black abyss, devoid of anything other than your body. The darkness (or otherwise the fire) is really not the scary part. It's the eternity. No matter what you do, you will always be in this place, with nothing but memories of the life you lived.
In life, everything is temporary. Sad times will always pass away eventually, as will happy times; even life itself will not last forever. As Abraham Lincoln once revered: and this, too, shall pass away. Because of this, it is difficult for us to really even begin to comprehend this concept of eternity. The length of eternity is not one lifetime, nor is it two or ten or a thousand lifetimes. Millions and billions and trillions of years can pass by, but eternity is still millions and billions and trillions of years longer. Put someone in solitary confinement on Earth for just one year and mental health disorders start cropping up. An eternity of torment sounds almost too fantastically nightmarish. Words alone really cannot describe its true extent.
Consider, now, eternal life. In a sense, Phil Connors had eternal life: even after dying innumerable times, he continued to live. Another form of eternal life is immortality, in which one can never die. Immortality can also be an immensely scary idea. In the last book of Fablehaven, a children's fantasy series written by Brandon Mull, the main characters are tasked to rescue the five Eternals—a group of humans who have been granted near-immortality as a means for protecting Zzyzx, a prison for demons. Zzyzx can only be opened if all five Eternals are killed, and the Eternals can only be killed by phoenix fire, a unicorn horn, dragon breath—something magic-related. Fablehaven is set in the real world, so this kind of stuff is extremely difficult to come across. One man is on a quest to open Zzyzx for misguided reasons, and the main characters need to rescue and hide the five Eternals before their enemy gets the chance to kill them. During their quest, the main characters locate one of the Eternals, but when they meet him, they find that he is immensely disillusioned. After centuries of immortality, everyone he once knew and grew close to—his family, friends, loved ones—have all long passed away. The Eternal reveals that he wants to die. With nothing left to live for, he could not care less about the demon prison. His refusal to be rescued leads to his death and a major setback for the heroes of the story.
The story of this Eternal is exactly the story which makes immortality seem terrifying as well. What if you were given the "gift" of immortality right here, right now? It would seem pretty fun at first, I guess. Throw in invincibility and you could jump off the Empire State Building and live to tell the tale. However, there's a catch: you are the only person in the world who is immortal. Once you become immortal, the terms "soon" and "long ago" become meaningless to you. A day is the same fraction of your life as a century. Your mother and your father, your brothers and your sisters, your spouses and your children—they will all be with you within their own lifetimes, but as you age on—50 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, 100,000 years—all of them will be nothing but a pleasant memory from many years ago as you watch people fighting, countries crumbling, leaders rising, scientists discovering. You might make new friends, new loved ones, but in time, they too will be nothing but a memory. Perhaps one day, immeasurable years in the future, you will find that the Sun has gone through its stellar life cycle and exploded, destroying planet Earth in the process. Perhaps when that day comes, humankind will have become so technologically advanced that they will have all managed to leave the Earth safely and colonize a different planet in another solar system. Perhaps one day, the memory of Earth will be nothing but a single chapter in the history of man. And what, then, of your mother and your father? Of your brothers and your sisters? Your spouses and your children? No one else will ever remember who they were or that they ever existed. And then perhaps one day, you live to see the heat death of the universe, when the universe has expanded so far apart that the particles are too far apart to generate any kind of energy—when the entire universe has reached thermodynamic equilibrium. There will be darkness. And it will last for eternity. Suddenly, immortality doesn't sound so much different from hell.
Perhaps it is time for us to realize and appreciate collectively as one human race that the time we have on Earth is limited. Why waste our time caught in ideological impasses, when we could instead work together to reach understandings, to make the world a better place for the humans that come after us? Why waste our time being sad, when this, too, shall pass away? Be thankful that we are not Mr. Phil Connors, stuck in an ever-repeating time loop, with no end in sight. Be grateful that we are not an Eternal. And above all else, in the time that you have: be happy!