6. We tend to experience (or become aware of) our finitude as an affront: the failing body, the lapsing memory, the distance we cannot traverse, the result we cannot achieve, the years we cannot live, the power we cannot wield. "Limits" always sound to us like a problem. We need, as corrective, an experience of the finite as gift. It is the kind of experience that Thomas Traherne described, drawing on memories of his early childhood, in a famous passage of his Centuries:
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. . . . The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. . . . Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared: which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. (3.3).
Here all the distinct and finite beauties and wonders of the world bring to the human soul a kind of infinite delight. The moment somehow includes the all and is therefore infinite. And yet, this is not really an escape into eternity, for it is momentary and it is made up of many finite pieces: grain fields, dust, stones, trees. It does not deny the reality of limitation, of temporality, of finitude; it is finitude itself becoming, however briefly, transparent to infinity.