to die alone

Do not vilify Time for Time is your Lord
---a Prophetic saying.

We are more than God in the knowledge of Death.
-----Allama Iqbal

Loneliness means at last I am whole.
---from The Wings of Desire.

Every single creature on this earth dies alone.The search for God is absurd if we die alone.
-----Donnie Darko.

Is Religion possible? The absence of God hasn't made the world any less opaque, any more comprehensible; in fact, if anything it has made it more mysterious. Things that are abandoned, people that are forgotten, burn with their own muted light, their own melancholic blue flame, when previously they would have been absorbed in a dazzling whiteness. Is it only now that man is confronted with the problem of time in all of its purity? The withdrawal of God only heightens the question of whether faith is possible-it does not abolish it.


The fire in the stone is its inner sense of the passage of time. It is only a trick of the mind that imagines any permanence inheres in its being. Its shape is never fixed or still, but always formless, striving to overflow its own bounds, undergoing an endless process of metamorphosis. This transfiguration which we measure in millions of years is but the blinking of an eye in the life of the stone. What is this restlessness but a search for God? But even so, it is a striving that is imposed on it, from without , as it were. It is like an angel that thirsts for more knowledge.


If we could go back in time would we change a single thing? The one thing necessary?


A rabbi once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup, or this brush, or this stone just a little, and thus everything.
-------Agamben, The Coming Community

Donnie starts out as an unbeliever...he doesn't even question this. But then he gradually realises -at the theoretical level at least-that if one could see all of the possible outcomes of a life then we would be able to see that God commands time. But what of free choice in those circumstances asks the teacher. This is not a possibility that arises since to place oneself in that 'God's time' is to accept a higher fatality that is like an arrow: destiny is a direction not an outcome.

At this stage he is now an agnostic since he cannot 'prove' his faith one way or the other. Faith is possible but not necessary...something that exists within the bounds of reason.

Only with an act of love does he realise time. Then time is not a concept or a biological fact but a lived experience; love is an act of sacrifice that redeems time and makes other futures possible. And like God's absence, it is a supreme opening up, a sublime act of generosity, to the loved one.

Love means freedom from the idol-temple of the days.
---Allama Iqbal