January 25, 2005
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Diamonds Are Forever
Robert Stone,
A Flag for Sunrise:”
‘That old Jew gave me this here.’ Egan looked at the
diamond. ‘I ain’t giving this to you, understand? The old
man gave it to me for my boy. It’s worth a whole lot of money–
you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I
think. It’s got a meaning, like.’
‘Let’s
see,’ Egan said, ‘what would it mean?’ He took hold of Pablo’s
hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. ‘”The
jewel is in the lotus,” perhaps that’s what it means. The eternal
in the temporal. The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of
compassion. Contemplating the ignorance of you and me,
eh? That’s a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.’Pablo’s
eyes glazed over. ‘Holy shit,’ he said. ‘Santa
Maria.’ He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion.‘Hey,’ he said to the priest, ‘diamonds are forever! You heard of that, right? That means something, don’t it?’
‘I have heard it,’ Egan said. ‘Perhaps it has a religious meaning.’ “
“We symbolize logical necessity
with the box( 
)
and logical possibility
with the diamond( “
).
FromIN KIERKEGAARD AND KANT
Nythamar Fernandes de OliveiraPontifical Catholic University
at Porto Alegre, Brazil“Such is the paradoxical ‘encounter’ of the eternal with the
temporal. Just like the Moment of the Incarnation, when the Eternal
entered the temporal, Kierkegaard refers to the category of the Instant
(Danish Ojeblikket, ‘a glance of the eye, eyeblink,’ German Augenblick) as the dialectical kernel of our existential consciousness:If the instant is posited, so is the eternal –but also the future,
which comes again like the past … The concept around which everything
turns in Christianity, the concept which makes all things new, is the fullness of time, is the instant as eternity, and yet this eternity is at once the future and the past.Although I cannot examine here the Kierkegaardian conception of
time, the dialectical articulation of time and existence, as can be
seen, underlies his entire philosophy of existence, just as the
opposition between ‘eternity’ and ‘temporality’: the instant, as ‘an
atom of eternity,’ serves to restructure the whole synthesis of
selfhood into a spiritual one, in man’s ‘ascent’ toward its Other and
the Unknown. In the last analysis, the Eternal transcends every
synthesis between eternity and time, infinity and finiteness,
preserving not only the Absolute Paradox in itself but above all the
wholly otherness of God. It is only because of the Eternal, therefore,
that humans can still hope to attain their ultimate vocation of
becoming a Chistian. As Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love (1847),The possibility of the good
is more than possibility, for it is the eternal. This is the basis of
the fact that one who hopes can never be deceived, for to hope is to
expect the possibility of the good; but the possibility of the good
is eternal. …But if there is less love in him, there is also less of
the eternal in him; but if there is less of the eternal in him, there
is also less possibility, less awareness of possibility (for
possibility appears through the temporal movement of the eternal within
the eternal in a human being).”
