Eternity

I’m still young. I will always be young.

I thought it was my idea to rewatch Girls, or possibly my girlfriend’s idea; one of ours, anyway, or why else would we have done it? So we rewatched the first episode of Girls, and it turned out to be a very weird experience that caused me to receive several terrifying insights about the true nature of the universe and the unreality of time. I mentioned this to my friend Ed, and he said that he’d just started rewatching Girls with his sister. In fact, the more people I mentioned it to, the more it became apparent that absolutely everyone I knew was rewatching Girls, we’d all started at the same time, we all thought it was our own idea, and most of us were receiving terrifying insights about the true nature of the universe and the unreality of time. Then, shortly afterwards, I started seeing the thinkpieces. Like hundreds of white butterflies all settling in a dried-up valley: this sudden flurry of unfocused, semi-personal essays, sometimes reaching for politics but mostly landing on melancholy, essays of the kind that might have been published in like The Awl or The New Inquiry in 2012 when Girls first came out, and all of them were about the subtle emotional qualities of rewatching Girls. Clearly someone had activated our programming. The little implant buzzes in our brains and off we go to fire up our torrent clients. But who was doing this to us? And why?

It felt weird, peering into this portal to 2012. According to the Stuck Culture thesis, culture kept producing new and interesting forms until some time between Fukuyama and the iPhone, at which point it simply stopped. If you played the pop music of 1980 to someone in 1968, Cars by Gary Numan or whatever, they would simply not be able to understand what they were listening to. Their tongue and eyeballs would bulge and pop in their skulls. Their poor hippie brains would disintegrate into a synth-induced jelly. But 1980 to 1968 is the same distance between now and 2012 when Girls first came out. If you played Chappell Roan to someone in 2012, their brain would remain intact. (You could even play it to the time-travelling synth-pop killer from 1980, and they’d think it was very current.) We don’t really have anything that would impress anyone in 2012. Our phones have three cameras now. Does that count? Back then, I wrote a short story about a machine in the Soviet Union that produces literature. Writers clocking in to the literature factory in their boiler suits, thumping the machine with a stick when something gets caught in the dialogue gears. We have that now, sort of. Is that impressive? Would the people of 2012 be proud? To be honest, I think they’d be very disappointed to discover that we’re all still talking about how culture has stopped moving, just like they were.

Can you blame us, though? After all the massive convolutions of the last decade, the riots, the moral panics, the populist insurgencies, the total collapse of the post-Cold War neoliberal order—despite everything, we’ve somehow ended up back exactly where we started. Not just because everyone is writing thinkpieces about Girls again. Here in Britain, a new government is announcing a raft of austerity measures to deal with a black hole their predecessors left in the state finances. We’re all in this together! The government budget is just like a household budget, after all. We just need to get rid of the winter fuel allowance, we just need a few grannies to freeze to death, and then you’ll see; all we need to do is take every last dignity from you and then we’ll enter a golden new era of runaway economic growth and prosperity for all. Weird: it feels like I’ve been here before. In America, meanwhile, the Democrats are running a historically unpopular middle-aged woman from the right wing of the party against Donald Trump. The polls are extremely close and narrowing, but for some reason everyone has chosen to ignore this entirely. They’ve decided that all the momentum is on their side, and Trump can’t possibly win. How could anything bad happen, when they’re all so giddy over their candidate, like sugar-rushing children? So instead of the usual campaign strategy of proposing any meaningful policies or offering literally anything at all to the voters, they’re throwing a big party for themselves about how popular their historically unpopular candidate is and how much everyone loves her. A big emphasis on celebrity endorsements. Loads of vibes. I can’t say for certain what happens next, but it feels like I’ve been here before too. Since the future is apparently already in my past, maybe it’s not too early to to say that Biden would have won.

Something’s gone wrong. The ordinary flow of time has been blocked. It’s gone stagnant. Big reservoirs of time, slowly clotting with algae. Whatever’s happening isn’t time, it’s just duration, and its only measure is decay. Lately I’ve started listening to all the electronic music I liked back in 2012. But instead of smuggling a big brown crystal of MDMA into the student union in my sock and ecstatically spazzing out until dawn, I’m sober and alone, running around the block at midnight on one of my pathetic little 5Ks to stave off the paunch. A friend showed me the video of a Chase & Status set at Boiler Room in London. These days, most of the audience for a club night aren’t in the sweat and the stink of it, they’re watching at home on YouTube. That feels new. I don’t know what I expected the bloke from Chase & Status to look like now, but he looks like he could do your taxes. He’s a balding Jew from north London, just like me. Flowdan still has the most menacing voice in music, but he’s forty-four years old. There’s grey in his beard. This is what it’s like to live in duration. You watch your body slowly fall to pieces while everything else stays exactly the same.

Which is part of what made rewatching Girls such an unsettling experience. My first reaction was to just think about all those years that happened to me while I wasn’t paying attention. Look at her, look at Lena Dunham: she’s so young. We all used to be so young. And I had no idea! I thought I was old in 2012, I thought I was grown up, because I was taking drugs and going clubbing. Just like how I think I’m old now, because I stay in and watch old HBO shows with my girlfriend, but in twelve years I’ll have discovered that actually I was young all along… And then, suddenly, I’m in the abyss. I’m looking at myself from ten years in the future, twenty, forty. I’m an old man, I’m a pile of bones. I’m experiencing myself from a hundred trillion years in the future when all the stars have burned out and the universe is nothing but black holes, draining its nothing into a blanker nothing than we can possibly conceive. I watched Girls and thought about how young Lena Dunham looked and how young absolutely everything is. Time has been going for just under fourteen billion years, which sounds like a while, but that’s less than two years for every human being on Earth. Collectively, we’ve lived the entire history of the universe since the beginning of 2023. As far as we know, the future will be much longer. There are trillions upon trillions of years still to come that we’ll never see: somehow, we’ve arrived right at the very beginning of everything. But most of those years will not be much fun. The universe keeps expanding, dragging everything further away from everything else; eventually matter will be too dispersed for huge clouds of dust to coalesce and turn into stars. Eventually mater will be too dispersed for molecules. The era of light and warmth is brief, maybe about a hundred trillion years, and the era in which there’s nothing except black holes and scattered subatomic particles will last for an impossibly long time. So long it needs numbers you’ve never heard of. Duodecillions, vigintillions of years. A vigintillion is a one followed by sixty-three zeroes. 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000. Our far future stretches for trillions of vigintillions of years, until the last black holes finally decay. On the scale of these long, long, dark aeons, the Big Bang is still happening. The entire history of our planet is part of the first hot flash of youth, when the universe was still full of fire and light.

This makes the gap from 2012, when Girls came out, to 2024, when I rewatched it, seem very brief. But I feel it. The only thing that’s come close to convincing me that something might have actually happened in the last twelve years was rewatching Lena Dunham’s Girls. Because while the world she describes—in which young people fritter their parents’ money away by living in New York to no obvious gain—still exists, Lena Dunham herself does not. For ten years it was open season on Lena Dunham, and now we’ve hunted her to extinction. You could accuse the poor weird earnest girl of anything, because she didn’t know how to stand up for herself. White privilege, obviously, white feminism, white entitlement, gaslighting, girlbossing, lovebombing, having the temerity to be talented when so many other people, through no fault of their own, are not. She wrote a memoir in which she described her seven-year-old self engaging in the kind of homoerotic play that’s not just normal but pretty much universal in small children, and then thousands of maniacs screamed that she was a child abuser until she issued a formal apology. She’s the only person ever actually punished for the failure of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. All the lameness and embarrassment of the brief millennial era has collected in her body. Like plastics in an albatross’s crop. Even now, whenever she briefly wobbles out of obscurity, it’s to thousands of people on the internet calling her fat. Everyone’s rewatching Girls, but weirdly that doesn’t seem to matter. Lena Dunham was the voice of a generation, and that generation has never forgiven her for it.

All of this, obviously, was prefigured in Girls. The entire show is about her character slowly coming to terms with the fact that she does not quite fit in the world, even though it keeps reflecting all her bad qualities back at her. Hannah Horvath is an index of her time’s disjuncture from itself. Selfish, sometimes callous, grasping—but also self-exposing, constantly getting her tits out on screen and her deeply private experiences out in the pages of some exploitative online publication. More immature the more she ages, hanging out with schoolchildren, adopting the sexual persona of a schoolchild. Most of all, there’s her OCD: everything she does has to be repeated, held in stasis; one moment can’t simply progress into the next. But it’s not her many faults that make life impossible for her; if anything it’s her virtues. She still wants to be a writer, a real writer; she doesn’t have any mercenary instincts, she doesn’t know how to commodify herself, or even how to match the version of her that exists in other people’s heads. In a way she’s a very old-fashioned creature, disappearing from the earth. Already in 2012, she’d arrived too late. In 2024, there are no more Hannah Horvaths.

In fact, almost none of Dunham’s characters are possible any more. Jessa, the sinister hipster: eradicated. There are still tightly wound control freaks like Marnie, but all the creative gracelessness that made her bearable has been optimised out by twelve years of the internet. The weird, intense, charismatic boys like Adam have all been irretrievably brain-damaged by some kind of psychotic incel ideology. Ray, the hypercritical slacker, sneering from on top of his unfinished PhD, hanging out with much younger women, essentially if not actually Jewish, with his beautiful hare lip—Ray was the object of five years of cultural terror. He’s back in Cincinnati now, cast out, pickling in his own resentment. The only type that’s survived is Shoshanna. Hard and dense, compact, virginal. Shoshanna is Hannah’s negative. They’re both narcissists, but Hannah’s is a primary narcissism; she’s obsessed with the raw sensuous experience of being herself, being jammed into the world at her particular awkward angle. Shoshanna’s is secondary narcissism, the narcissism of the image of the self, the self as an object, the only object, swallowing all object-cathexes… In front of her Sex and the City poster: ‘I think I’m definitely a Carrie at heart, but sometimes Samantha kind of comes out.’ She survived because her type is typification itself, the process of mutilating the self into categories. That’s how you get ahead in the marketplace, and every last vestige of social life is a marketplace now. Everyone has turned into Shoshanna, men and women alike.¹ The Shoshanna-machine spits out holographic versions of Hannah (‘literary it girl,’ ‘thought daughter’) and Jessa (‘indie sleaze’), but it’s all just Shoshanna underneath, one planetary Shoshanna spinning autistically through predetermined space.

This is what it felt like to rewatch Girls. The show is like a parody of the early 2010s: the clothes, the hair, the MGMT soundtrack—it’s all a little too over the top, like something set in the 1960s where all the cops are wearing tie-dye uniforms. Yes, ok, we get it, it’s 2012. But the disjuncture between the vanished world represented on the screen and the world outside wasn’t enough to make me feel that time had, in fact, been passing. The opposite: it made me suddenly very convinced that time is not real. How else could Lena Dunham represent her present as if it were already a piece of the past? Her curse is to be perfectly self-aware, genuinely brilliant at identifying what’s wrong with herself and her cohort, but totally powerless to change any of it. What we experience as the present—open, prefiguring anything—is for Lena Dunham already complete. The more I watched Girls, the less sense any of it made. I could remember 2012. Back then, that felt like the present. I thought my life was real. Was I wrong? What’s so special about 2024, that it gets to be now? What is this thing, the present, that gives all the stuff in it concrete reality, and reduces every other moment to nothing more than a memory, or a hope, or a ghost?

There are two main approaches to the philosophy of time. Because contemporary philosophy is the only academic discipline to suffer from accountancy envy, contemporary philosophers call them A-theory and B-theory, but their real names are presentism and eternalism.² Presentism is the proposition that now is now, and it’s when all the stuff is. The past used to be real, but now it’s not; the future, which hasn’t happened yet, is nothing at all. In the Bhaddekaratta Sutta, it’s recorded that the Buddha taught this doctrine to the monks at Jetavana. ‘That which is past is left behind; unattained is the yet-to-come; but that which is present can be discerned with insight.’ The Sautrantika and Theravada schools of Buddhism hold that everything exists only in the present, but since the present has no thickness, because it’s over as soon as it arrives, everything is constantly being extinguished. There can be no continuity between an object in the present and an object in the past, since the past doesn’t exist. You did not read the first word in this sentence; the person reading these words now is already gone. There’s a similar notion in the occasionalism of Abu Hasan al-Ash’ari, recurring in al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers: that the passage of time is an illusion. Surah Az-Zumar states that ‘God created all things, and He is the agent on which all things depend;’ while the Ayat al-Kursi, the most celebrated verse in the entire Qur’an, tells us that he is not just entirely outside the universe, but uses the physical universe as his footstool. In Islamic occasionalism, this transcendent God creates the world, but since nothing can exist outside him, it immediately crumbles into nothingness: God must continually recreate the universe every instant. There is no past, and nothing moves in space or time; when you throw a ball God just recreates it in a series of slightly different positions.

Eternalism is the proposition that all points in time exist. In 2024, I’m running around London to drum and bass. In 2012, I’m saucer-eyed in the smoking area of Mint club in Leeds, babbling nonsense to someone I don’t even know. Vigintillions of vigintillions of years from now, all the atoms that once made up my body are decaying into iron, and aeons after that the atoms themselves are disintegrating. Even if I happen to be currently experiencing the bit where baryonic matter still exists but everyone has to wear bluetooth headphones, there’s nothing about this particular moment that makes it any more real than any of the others. In a way, it’s comforting: the empty universe that’s coming does not obliterate the sunlit one I’m living in now. I’m still young. I will always be young.

In Buddhism, eternalism is endorsed by the Sarvastivada or All-Is-Real school, for whom anything with dravyasat or substantial existence must persist across the three times of past, present, and future. For Christianity in particular, the existence of God seems to require some kind of eternalism. As St Thomas Aquinas writes in the Compendium Theologiae, ‘God knows, in his eternity, all that takes place throughout the whole course of time. For his eternity is in present contact with the whole course of time, and even passes beyond time. We may fancy that God knows the flight of time in his eternity, in the way that a person standing on top of a watchtower embraces in a single glance a whole caravan of passing travellers.’ It’s not currently 2024 for God; we might be looking forward to Judgement Day, but for God it’s already achieved. He created the beginning and end of the universe in a single instant. This makes a lot of sense, especially in the light of Einsteinian relativity and its weird time-distortions, but it’s hard to reconcile with the actual substance of Christian doctrine. This is a God who actively intervenes in history: who got down from his tower and turned himself into flesh to feel time rushing past his ears, who raised his head for a moment before he died and said ‘It is finished.’

But then there’s Augustine. Philosophers simply cannot work out whether St Augustine of Hippo was a presentist or an eternalist. Theology departments have torn themselves apart over the question. It’s led to sporadic gun battles between factions of Maronite monks on the foothills of Mount Lebanon. The Wikipedia article for Eternalism (philosophy of time) cites Augustine as an eternalist. The Wikipedia article for Philosophical presentism cites him as a presentist. Augustine spends Book XI of his Confessions meditating on time—on the question of what God was doing before the creation of the universe (he quotes a wit who replied ‘preparing Hell for those who ask questions too deep for them’), on the shortness of the present, which ‘flies so swiftly from the future to the past that it cannot be assigned a fraction of a moment’s extension,’ on the psychology of attention and expectation. He admits to finding most of this stuff difficult to get his head around. ‘What, then, is time? As long as no one asks me, I know; but if someone asks me and I try to explain, I do not know.’ A lot of what he says sounds like presentism. ‘My boyhood no longer exists; it is in the past, which no longer exists. When I recall it, it is the image of it that I contemplate in present time… It is not correct to say that there are three tenses, past, present, and future, though it may be true to say that there are the present-regarding-the-past, present-regarding-the-present, and the present-regarding-the-future.’ But when he talks about God, he slips into what looks a lot like eternalism. ‘All times past you precede in the loftiness of your ever-present eternity, and all future times you outlast.’

But if this is eternalism, Augustine’s eternity is a weird one. Where Aquinas puts God out of time altogether, witnessing all points in the block of time simultaneously, Augustine makes eternity into an endlessly extended present. ‘Your years neither come nor go; our years come and go, as all years do… Your years are but one day, and your day is not ‘every day’ but ‘today,’ since your day does not give way to your tomorrow, nor take over from your yesterday.’ God experiences a world in total stasis, going nowhere. Stagnant. Blocked. Eternity might be infinite, but it’s the infinity of a single moment, frozen in time. It could be any moment at all. Eternity resides in a cloudy Monday, when the sky is so evenly grey, glowing faintly from every corner, that it feels like there’s no sun to set and no end to the mid-afternoon. Stuck inside. Rewatching Girls.

1. Just look at what’s happened to sex. By 2012, five decades of sexual revolution had left sex demystified and disenchanted: like food, it could be enjoyable, or bland but healthy, or sometimes nasty or weird or make you sick, but fundamentally it was an ordinary part of life. At the time this might have seemed like a sad, prosaic end to the erotic imagination, but the last decade has pitched us right back into a guilty Victorian obsession that’s so much worse. Sex is abstracted, sublimated; even the people who fuck on camera have a basically virginal relation to this grand exteriority. People have started prudishly objecting to sex scenes in films, but spend hours each day watching porn. There are teenagers who already describe themselves as incels. Men with terrifyingly smooth skin stand on street corners, holding tiny microphones and asking random women for their body count, and if it’s more than two or three they’ll go daaaamn, yoooo, so you a hoe fr? All the old goblins are crawling back: shame, honour, the insistence on a gendered division of labour. Not so long ago, men and women from the same socioeconomic background would vote in broadly the same way. There were gaps, but small ones. Now, the gender divide is sometimes more significant than race or age or class. Women want to tear down all social structures and revert to savagery in the name of justice. Men are outright Nazis. We are no longer comprehensible to each other, we inhabit different systems of signifiers, and all the mediating fantasies have melted away…

2. Actually, the terms don’t precisely map on to each other; you can, in fact, be an A-theorist without being a presentist, if you’re prepared to accept the validity of tensed statements while also maintaining a four-dimensional account of reality.