time, eternity: The Death of Adam

“The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention. In certain context the improbably is called the miraculous. What is eternal must always be complete, if my understanding is correct. So it is possible to imaging that time was created in order that there might be narrative—event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement. A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation. Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exit in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguise it from us, as if we were visited by revelation.” -Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam , HT: The Search, BRETT MCCRACKEN