This is an essay I was asked to write for a Spanish language anthology, not yet released, asked of several men of letters their thoughts and opinions about the life to come. I reprint it here with the editor’s permission.
The garden of paradise lies beyond the fields we know, where we slumber and labor, and we father sons and see them fall in war, where we have toothache and heartache and mighty loves and tiny wasps to engage our attention, and to console us is the Church like a mother who takes a crying child in her arms. This is called the valley of tears not because life here is nothing but tears, but because life there is nothing like tears.
Little can be known of these gardens and less can be said, for words are curving yardsticks and crooked walking sticks indeed. But what little can be said must be said, for to that gate of pearl we all must go, whether we will or not, and all who fear eternal death yearn for eternal life, which is not found on this side of the gate. But how can we know what no man has seen, sight which mortal eyes, by their nature, might be too dim to see, and mortal minds too dark?
Perhaps we can know the unknown by what little clues the unknown has made known to us.
Once, two twins in the womb were discussing conditions outside, for they no doubt had heard a rumor or report that they were soon to be disembarked or, rather, decanted into that strange outward realm so much unlike their present condition. One twin thought the world outside the womb might be two or three times as large, but otherwise would be much the same as this, a dark and comfortably narrow space, filled with warmth and fluid, and nutriments sucked in through the belly button. The other, more daring, mentioned the voice he sometimes heard through the living walls of their world, the voice of the mother who comprised the whole world, and he dared to dream that one day, after birth, he would see the mother face to face. He wondered if he might hear her more clearly there, and perhaps find the owner of the beating heart beneath which they slept.
The first was doubtful, pointing out that if they departed from the world of the womb, the umbilicus which fed them might drop away, and belly button would become useless, and they would starve. The second one sucked on his thumb a while in thought, and answered that perhaps there was some other organ, some method of taking in nutrient, which the babes in the womb world had not yet imagined.
Now if the unborn were truly wise, they might examine their eyes, and wonder if the world outside held light, for otherwise these organs have no use. They might inspect their hands and feet, and grasp that in the world outside there would be things to grasp, and surfaces on which to walk. But they could not imagine, even in their most daring leaps of fantasy, that in the months after mother’s milk there would be fruit and food and even feasts, and that their hands would not only grasp things as various as the strings of the lyre or the trigger of a gun, and that their feet would wade through clear pools or flowery grasses, or carry them dancing with their beloved in their arms, arms which would one day in turn carry babies like themselves.
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