Sublime

may be like playing a game in which the rules are constantly changed without ever being made clear—a game from which one cannot withdraw without suicide, and in which one can never return to an older form of the game.

Capacious

Infinite play resounds throughout with a kind of laughter. It is not a laughter at others who have come to an unexpected end, having thought they were going somewhere else. It is laughter with others with whom we have discovered that the end we thought we were coming to has unexpectedly opened. We laugh not at what has surprisingly come to be impos

Before I can have an enemy, I must persuade another to recognize me as an enemy. I cannot be a hero unless I can first find someone who will threaten my life—or, better, take my life.

‘A life without temporal boundaries,’ writes the philosopher Samuel Scheffler, ‘would be no more a life than a circle without a circumference would be a circle.’

The End of Eternity

If this life not be a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatrics from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we . . . are needed to redeem. —WILLIAM JAMES

Inasmuch as a finite game is intended for conclusion, inasmuch as its roles are scripted and performed for an audience, we shall refer to finite play as theatrical.

Any finite life—even the best one you could possibly imagine—is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.