Intimations of Immortality
Intimations of Immortality
The Artist’s Secular Sphere of Spirituality
This chapter reflects on how memory provides “intimations of immortality” for loved ones still alive to remember and suggests that the artist's secular sphere of spirituality occurs at the intersection of time and timelessness. Henry Scott Holland (1847–1918), who was Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, believes that the power of memory is so strong that friends and family, though separated by the wall of death, continue to communicate with one another unchanged. In The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life, the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton describes five ways in which we seek out continuity as mortal beings: through our children and family, cycles of nature, theology, ecstasy and transcendence, and creative works. Although many believe in heaven and hell as part of a divinely created universe, this chapter suggests that they are among those structures of meaning that humans themselves conceived: grand religious ideas with endless artistic elaborations that enable those who believe in God—and those who don't—to imagine eternity.
Keywords: memory, intimations of immortality, art, spirituality, time, timelessness, death, Robert Jay Lifton, heaven and hell, eternity
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