A Very Brief History of Eternity

Carlos Eire

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400831876
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From the author of Waiting for Snow in Havana, a brilliant cultural history of the idea of eternity What is eternity? Is it anything other than a purely abstract concept, totally unrelated to our lives? A mere hope? A frightfully uncertain horizon? Or is it a certainty, shared by priest and scientist alike, and an essential element in all human relations?In A Very Brief History of Eternity, Carlos Eire, the historian and National Book Award–winning author of Waiting for Snow in Havana, has written a brilliant history of eternity in Western culture. Tracing the idea from ancient times to the present, Eire examines the rise and fall of five different conceptions of eternity, exploring how they developed and how they have helped shape individual and collective self-understanding.A book about lived beliefs and their relationship to social and political realities, A Very Brief History of Eternity is also about unbelief, and the tangled and often rancorous relation between faith and reason. Its subject is the largest subject of all, one that has taxed minds great and small for centuries, and will forever be of human interest, intellectually, spiritually, and viscerally.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• I Big Bang, Big Sleep, Big Problem
• II Eternity Conceived
• III Eternity Overflowing
• IV Eternity Reformed
• V From Eternity to Five-Year Plans
• VI Not Here, Not Now, Not Ever
• Appendix Common Conceptions of Eternity
• Notes
• Eternity A Basic Bibliography
• Index