Time is confusing

I’m sorry, this goes back to The Great Divorce, but I want to talk about a few things. Near the end of the story, the narrator sees “an assembly of gigantic forms all motionless,” standing around a table with a chess board on it. The chess pieces are “puppet representatives” of the enormous beings standing around, and the representatives appear as they do in the world. The board represents Time, and the loafing giants are the immortal souls of the people on the board. The narrator is taken quite aback by this observation, and spirals into a storm of questions and panic.

My mind is boggled in much the same way, but I’ll try to think out loud and flesh some of this out. Time is a terribly confusing thing, as I leaned by watching specials on the Science Chanel. We live life moment by moment because we can only view time in the present. Our experiences happen, but are instantly lost to our past. In a similar way, our futures are uncertain and completely intangible. I think what Lewis may be depicting (or at least what I see it as) here is our souls--our essential persons--as they appear free from the lens of time. That is to say, our lives displayed as a whole, all at once in the same frame.

The example my mind uses to picture this is, if you recorded video of your entire life and then took each frame of film and fused each image of your body to the edge of the next image of your body, you would get a representation of your body as it was in each moment in time, but be able to see every moment at one moment. Your body would stretch for miles and become this enormously long picture of your entire life.

As Macdonald sort of explains, we could not possibly bear to view our eternal souls as they appear without the lens of time. For many reasons , we are only capable of comprehending a fraction of our souls. I have to agree with Macdonald in that to see every one of my actions and choices and the results of those as well as the eternal choice I make (Heaven or Hell/nothingness) as a whole would be far too much.