Main news for 2 August 2022

In all times there have been people who saw the meaning of life in creative and constructive labor. And the point here is not that labor ennobles a person by itself. Like most human occupations, labor in itself is spiritually and morally neutral: it can both help a person's spiritual and moral formation and hinder it. But labor allows one to arrange the world around a person. To change the space surrounding a person, both spiritual and physical. Building palaces and planting gardens, Ecclesiastes changes the physical space around him.

Joining himself to wisdom and assimilating it, he changes the spiritual space: after all, wisdom was needed first of all so that the reality around a person would be filled with new meanings, just as, when palaces are built and gardens are planted, it is filled with new things. And suddenly, like thunder from a clear sky, comes the awareness of one's own mortality. And therefore of the inevitable end. The world created by the person will remain, but its creator will depart. Just as everyone departs when he has completed his earthly path. And neither the things created nor the meanings revealed will help. The thought of death is like the strike of a gong during the sacred dance of the Sufis: the dance of life stops instantly, everything freezes, and something else begins, something that cannot be seen or understood from here, from the world of the living.

But if so, what are all the efforts for? They were needed only so that life might acquire meaning. A meaning as eternal as this world itself. But what was found through creation and wisdom turned out to be by no means eternal. Eternity slipped away, and the meanings found and the things created will not remain in eternity. They will go into the past. Or into the future, and from the point of view of eternity there is little difference between past and future.

Neither the past nor the future has any relation equally to that Present by which a person lives. Working for an unknown future is just as meaningless as working for a well-known past. One is no more real than the other. What a person has created and made meaningful remains in the past when the person departs. It can return to the present in the future, but then in that future there must be someone who will let it into his life just as Ecclesiastes himself let meanings and things into his own life. An heir. A successor.

For him our future will become the present, and in it things will come alive and meanings will rise again. Or they may not rise again: no one can be sure of heirs and successors. And these will already be other things and other meanings, created and discovered anew. Another life. This is not eternity; it is again only swiftly flowing time. The future replacing the past. Without the Present. Again "vanity of vanities."