We had some excellent comments on the post about grief and loss when anything good slips into the past.

Bruce Charlton:

I also think each year about how many more springs, or autumns I will see – certainly a lot fewer than I have already seen. So each is more special and distinctive (and indeed each IS distinctive, as well as stereotypical).

But the thing is for me not to feel despair over this, nor to dread the sands of time running away grain by grain… but to take the attitude that you advocate here; that every time *anything* happens is the last time.

For RW Emerson, this was a corrosive thought (see his poem Days – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45873/days-56d22594f3322) because the only record of days that RWE acknowledged was human memory, which fades immediately and dies with the brain.

But if we know that nothing real is forgotten, and recorded eternally somehow, then everything that is worthwhile is permanent – well, *then* everything worthy of notice takes-on a very different complexion.

Andrew:

I found it unbearably tragic that “those special moments” seemed so fleeting and instantly lost. This was enhanced by the idea that the full significance, importance, and meaning may not have been shared with others – even the loved one a part of it and forever lost and unexpressed. I think the most easily relatable example is watching our children growing up.

My thought is that this is not really so though, and must not be so, but just our temporal experience.

God *is* the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. God is Eternal. He knows all things so perfectly in eternity that they are truly manifest and exist in eternity.

So all those good things, all those even seemingly mundane and silly things, like children playing, and singing songs, and hugging are truly eternal as God is – truly existing in the eternity of eternities – world without end – is now and ever shall be.

The flip side of this is each of those good moments are true manifestations of God in the present, a part of His real presence really existing with us at that very moment. Our time-boundness allows us to continue making God manifest in ways unique to us and our loved ones.

So when we fill our lives with the good we are filling our lives with the things that are true, moments that will eternally be really present in God and Heaven.

E.C.:

Creation comes with a price:
Dissolution dogs its trail of glory.
Beauty also has its weight:
The loveliest things are most ephemeral.
Strength requires much of itself, and yet
A constant strain towards perfection
Ends in weakness ere life’s course is run.
Why, then, do we create?
Why do we, poor mortals, love beauty,
Revere strength?
For all these pass away
Under time’s great and unrelenting passage.
Yet we do not believe in endings
If we did, despair would crush us
And turn our deepest hopes to endless dread
So hope we must,
For that high perfect love
Which can create, and beautify, and strengthen
For all eternity to come.

And here,excerpted from Moses 1, is God:

All things are present with me, for I know them all.

Many worlds have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them.

The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine.

Hell is Impermanence?

On the other hand, there is this:

But if it be not built upon my gospel, and is built upon the works of men, or upon the works of the devil, verily I say unto you they have joy in their works for a season, and by and by the end cometh, and they are hewn down and cast into the fire, from whence there is no return.

For their works do follow them, for it is because of their works that they are hewn down; therefore remember the things that I have told you.

Even works that are merely the works of men are hewn down and cast into the fire.  I think the fire here just means destruction.  It is the fire that consumes and leaves ashes behind.  In other words, the fire is impermanence.  And therefore meaninglessness.