“Ephemeral Unity” from “Remembering Eternity”
“The perfect beauty of his Oneness with everything: of sitting merged with the ocean that pulsed with his heartbeat; of melting into the sand, undifferentiated from it; of gazing at the stars while simultaneously staring down from them—gave way to the taste of bittersweetness, the bittersweetness of mortal life itself, of its exquisite, fragile joys savored in the context of anticipated death. The moment brought together, as the repeated phrase in Bolero had for him as a child, the keenest rapture (in which the soul swelled mighty, pressing urgently against every bar, window, and wall of its bodily prison in an effort to escape) and the most piercing pain. The moment was akin to that when Romeo discovers the apparently dead Juliet; it had that same sense of gaining the dream only to instantly lose it. Skylar felt like someone who has just discovered the greatest human secret, of enduring happiness, only to be told by his doctor that he will die within the hour. The experience was that of a first-time mother who gives birth, looks into her infant’s eyes, and then watches him die, or that of a composer who has spent his entire life praying that the divine music will be revealed to him so that he might share it with the world; who then, in revery, hears it, perfect and complete, but as a consequence excites himself into a stroke which renders him mute and unable even to write down the notes.”
