Heart the Lover

by Lily King

‘Othello places his trust in Iago, not Desdemona. Anna Karenina’s society does not allow her to be with Vronsky. Love is not the weakness. People get in its way. People are weak and perilous, not love.’

Someday we will remember even these our hardships with pleasure.

‘Well, I believe we’re all one. Same consciousness or awareness or whatever you want to call it. The universe is expanding now but soon—in a few more billion years—we’ll start shrinking back again to what we were before the Big Bang. We’ll get smaller and smaller and then for a moment we’ll be a tiny speck. After that they say we’ll be nothing—we won’t exist at all inside a black hole. Then there’ll be another bang and we’ll return.’ ‘Surprise!’ he says faintly. ‘I think we desire unity because we have felt it before and we want to feel it again. It’s our natural state.’

She said there were two prevailing theories, eternalism and presentism. Eternalism is the belief that everything that is, has been, and will be exists right now and forever, all at once. Presentism is the belief that only what exists in the present exists at all. Nothing before and nothing after. No exceptions. As we were walking off stage I asked her which she believed, and she told me she could make a strong case for either, but recently she was leaning toward presentism. I didn’t understand why she would lean toward presentism, why she would choose only the present moment—no past, no future—when she could have everything all at once for eternity. But standing here in line, with all these good people working to help others get better, it feels okay to me to have this moment and nothing else. It feels vast, open, beautiful. Only this right here right now.