Finished Portrait

continued

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun.
                                                 John Newton

Time in heaven... how different from earth's time it must be! It was another of my early difficulties in attempting to form a concept of heaven-before-us: Forever lasts so long! Such an endless stretch of years, centuries, millennia... with never any fewer eons ahead. Mightn't eternity come not as blessing, but burden?

Leos Janacek's opera, The Makropulos Case, is about a woman enabled as a result of a chemical elixir to live on and on. That was all I knew of the story as John and I parked the car in the Lincoln Center garage in New York on January 5,1996, for the Metropolitan Opera's first-ever performance of it, with the great soprano Jessye Norman in the title role.

But Ms. Norman never stepped onstage that night.

The house lights dimmed, the crystal chandeliers rose majestically to the ceiling of the four-thousand-seat theater, and the curtains opened on a larger-than-life office setting. A lawyer's clerk, alone on stage, mused on the meaning of life as he climbed a ladder set against a gigantic filing cabinet. Ten feet up, he paused. The words he sang, as translated on the monitor at my seat, were:

"Too bad you can only live so long."

As he finished the line, he released his grip on the ladder and fell backward. What a dramatic opening scene! I thought, probably along with the rest of the audience. The fall so realistically done!

Too realistic... falling too fast... landing on his back ... In the sudden silence of the orchestra, it took a moment for the thud to reach our seats at the back of the huge house.

The curtains swiftly closed. The audience milled for a while in the aisles. When the announcement came, it was simply that Richard Versalle was being taken to a hospital. But Mr. Versalle was dead, probably before he struck the floor.

The performance of course was cancelled. Back in our car, we wrestled all the way home with the extraordinary juxtaposition of stage fiction and real life we had just witnessed. A sixty-three-year-old tenor who, my choir-trained husband says, had just hit a beautiful high B, dying as he sang that life is too short. In an opera about a woman who's discovered, according to the program notes, that her life is too long.

A few days later I read the complete libretto. Elina Makropulos's age at the time of the story is three hundred and thirty-seven. If three hundred years has been an unendurable lifetime - as the dialogue indicates - what about a life lasting three thousand, or three million years! Elina has not grown old as long-lived people do on earth. It's not infirmity that destroys her desire to live; the elixir has bestowed perpetual youth. It's simply the ceaseless succession of days, no matter how enjoyable each one in itself, that eventually becomes intolerable.

If a never-ending life is a promise rather than a threat, time in heaven must be experienced in another way.

I got a hint of this other way when I visited a friend of my mother's in a nursing home in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Mother had warned me that Ahna wouldn't know me. A brilliant woman, a pioneer in the education of learning-disabled children, Ahna Fiske's memory, Mother said, had failed.

Sure enough, this accomplished lady had lost all recall, even of events only minutes old. Over and over, Ahna welcomed me into her room as though I'd only then arrived.

Otherwise, though, her observations were as keen as ever. She was clearly aware that her memory no longer served her, for she kept asking, "Have I just told you that?" Nor had she lost any of her zest for life. As I stood up to leave, she apologized for not remembering the name I'd repeated a dozen times.

"I can't recall much of anything these days," she said. "I only have the moment I'm in, so I just enjoy that one."

I only have the moment... As I went out to my car, I wondered if heaven's "time" may be a little like that - except with our memories intact! As William Blake reminds us in his poem "Eternity," to fail to live in the passing moment is to fail to live:

He who bends to himself a Joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the Joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

“Kissing the joy!” Not trying to hang onto it or waiting for a joy that’s to come tomorrow. Perhaps if we could learn to do this, we’d have a hint of what heaven’s time is like.

Perhaps we’ll know “forever” as the moment I’m in.