"I know only two things"

Alan Jacobs' newsletter, this morning, had a link to this description of an encounter with W.H. Auden:

Auden had a cracked and wrinkled face, like a baked mudflat, and he told me that he would soon be dead. (Indeed, he died a couple of years later.)

"I've learned a little in my life," he said. "Not much. But I will share with you what I do know. I hope it will help."

He lit a cigarette, looked at the ceiling, then said, "I know only two things. The first is this: There is no such thing as time." He explained that time was an illusion: past, present, future. Eternity was "without a beginning or an end," and we must come to terms with what underlies time, or exists around its edges. He quoted the Gospel of John, where Jesus said: "Before Abraham was, I am." That disjunctive remark upends our notions of chronology once and for all, he told me.

I listened, a bit puzzled, then asked: "So what's the second thing?" "Ah, that," he said. "The second thing is simply advice. Rest in God, dear boy. Rest in God." ....

What W.H. Auden taught me about Easter, God and surviving a season of Covid-19 (opinion) - CNN