"...he returns every summer to the northern-Swedish landscape he knows from his childhood. His love of the place is premised on the knowledge that he will not always be able to return; that he, or it, will not be there forever..."

If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything

Martin Hägglund argues that rigorous secularism leads to socialism.

By James Wood

May 13, 2019

"The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist (Hägglund is uninterested in the pin dancing of proof and disproof) but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration. Hägglund, who was born and reared in Sweden and now teaches comparative literature at Yale, begins his book by telling us that he returns every summer to the northern-Swedish landscape he knows from his childhood. His love of the place is premised on the knowledge that he will not always be able to return; that he, or it, will not be there forever..."