The Literary Mind.pdf

7
SINGLE LIVES
O Lord ... Your years neither go nor come, but our years
pass and others come after them, so that they all may come
in their turn. Your years are completely present to you all at
once, because they are at a permanent standstill.... Your
years are one day, yet your day does not come daily but is
always today, because your today does not give place to any
tomorrow nor does it take the place of any yesterday. Your
today is eternity.
Augustine, Confessions
PERSON has a single life, by which I mean not that we live only once, true
as that is, but that a human being—a mind in a brain in a body—leads a
singular rather than a general existence. A God's-eye view is a general view—it
can belong only to a being whose existence is without limit or locale. Since God's
eye is everywhere, eternal, and all-seeing, it is undifferentiated. To the eye of
God, there would not be alternative ways of seeing, but only seeing pure and
absolute and permanent. A human being does not have a God's-eye view. A
human being has always only a single view, which is always local. This is so
unacceptable as to have been sufficient reason for the invention of God.
It is astonishing that we forget so easily that we have only a single, local view.
What we see of an event may look entirely unlike what a person on the other
side of the event may see or entirely unlike what we ourselves actually do see when
we walk to the other side, but we imagine that these views from either side are
nonetheless views of the same story, despite the manifest differences in perceptions.
This is evidence of our considerable mental capacity to integrate fragmentary
information, to blend it into one mental construction.
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