I woke up this morning on the couch of my friend's apartment to the sounds of Midlake's "Bandits," off their album The Trials Of Van Occupanther. And though I've heard the song several times before, it sounded so incredibly beautiful and...perfect this time. Despite my physical discomfort (see below), and the inconvenience of being awoken at 7 a.m., the song could not have sounded more amazing, more perfectly composed. I don't know if it was my own early morning stupor or a dream's residue that made that music seem so sonically serendipitous.
But the physical reflex that sent my hand lunging for the snooze button cut short any waking and sustained enjoyment I might have had, and, just like waking from a dream, the experience was soon relegated to the fickle archives of memory. And just like most dreams, even that vivid and profound experience slowly slipped into ephemerality.
Ephemeral. How perfect!
See, the reason I was on the couch and not in the bed that had been set aside for me was because the apartment had been without air conditioning for the past few days, and the living room was the only room with a fan. So I decided to set up camp there for the night. Six hours later, there I lay, early morning, my throat was sore and hot (as it had been to some degree for the past few days for some unexplained - because uninvestigated - reason), my body had that sticky-sweaty feel, and despite dropping temperatures and a ceiling fan, the room was still about 85 degrees. Those factors combined created, fairly accurately, the experience of having a fever. I say all this because of ephemeral's etymology. It's first documented use was in 1398 as a medical term denoting a fever lasting only a day. How fitting then, that my ephemeral experience was two-fold in such an etymologically accurate manner!
But I think the etymological roots of ephemeral still linger in our usage today, even if only existentially coincidental. For it seems that ephemeral experiences, such as my musical morning awakening, remain in our memory much like those memories forged during periods of serious illness, such as, especially in early medicine, a fever. When one returns to those experiences afterwards, there is a certain sense in which we remember them only as interruptions, and as such, the more temporal distance that grows between our current self and that memory, the more difficult it is to definitively conclude that that experience wasn't simply a dream, or something seen in a movie, or a childhood fantasy.
This might be different if we used "ephemeral" to describe events that, even though fleeting, were substantial and consequential. However, this is not our ordinary use of the word. What is ephemeral is usually taken to be fleeting because it is insubstantial, because it is not largely important. One might say that, in one sense, "catastrophic" is the opposite of ephemeral, for though both denote a event or thing that is only brief and momentary, the former has weight, has consequences.
If the grass of the field is ephemeral, the lightening that splits the oak is catastrophic. And when we look back at the field, it is easy to remember the lightening and to see its effects. We might have once built a swing from one of its limbs that was rendered useless when the tree was struck. Catastrophic events change our lives, they "overturn" (Gk. katastrephein) the familiar. But looking back at the field, at the grass, we may have vague memories of greener patches, but for the most part, whatever changes may have occurred need not effect the large scheme of things, need not effect our lives.
What then of a God who clothes this grass? Of a God who feeds the sparrow? Of a God who counts hairs? When the beauty of the fleeting, the ephemeral, is eternally sustained in the heart of God? When everything is held in the life of God? When dreams are eternally sustained and breathed and loved? When the ephemeral is catastrophic?
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