paul j. griffiths

In 2003, Carlos Eire, who holds a chair in history and religious studies at Yale and has written widely on early modern history and religion, published Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, a memoir of his early childhood in Cuba, which he left in 1962 at the age of eleven and to which he has not since returned. That memoir is intense and elegiac, saturated with the sensory and emotional memories of childhood. Eire is a man not only capable of remembering and writing about the smells and tastes and feelings of his childhood. He is also outraged by the fact that he must die, at least if that means he will then cease altogether to be; this outrage is among the central themes of his new book, A Very Brief History of Eternity. Perhaps these two are in some way connected? The texture and savor of my childhood are almost completely lost to me—it is a series of tableaus, static and unconnected, occupied by someone I don’t recognize—and at the same time I find the thought of my death quite appealing, something to be welcomed even if not sought. Eire is the mirror-image, suggesting that a certain view of childhood might go hand in hand with a particular view of death: the better you recall, or think you recall, a paradisial childhood, the more the approach of death will seem outrageous and frightening. Might this in turn suggest that dwelling on (imagining) a childhood in the garden is something better not done? There are cherubim with flaming swords who warn against that sort of thing.