Charles Simic, outgoing U.S. Poet Laureate, recently published his nineteenth book of poems, entitled That Little Something. The title is both a joke and a lament: Simic is a poet who, during a long and successful career, has mastered the art of sounding ironic and playful while actually being sincere and serious. We should not be surprised to discover, then, that his latest book of poems is not about something little nor, in fact, about a thing at all. It concerns instead a big problem with which all of us are familiar: the problem of eternity.

This problem is particularly acute for secular thinkers and poets, Simic among them, who reject of the idea of eternity but nonetheless feel compelled to address its absence. That Little Something does this directly in the allegorical poem "Night Clerk in a Roach Hotel":

I'm the furtive inspector of dimly lit corridors,
Dead light bulbs and red exit signs,
Doors that show traces 
Of numerous attempts at violent entry,

Is that the sound of a maid making the bed at midnight?
The rustle of counterfeit bills
Being counted in the wedding suite?
A fine-tooth comb passing through a head of gray hair?

Eternity is a mirror and a spider web,
Someone wrote with lipstick in the elevator.
I better get the passkey and see for myself.
I better bring along a book of matches too.

"Eternity is a mirror and a spider web." The poet suggests that eternity is at once dependent on and opposed to human time, in the same way that our reflection in a mirror is both dependent on and opposed to our bodies. Eternity is the abolition of time, but, for us, this abolition can only be achieved through a kind of death. The classical tradition made this point via the myth of Narcissus, but for those of us living in the Roach Hotel, a spider web is something more of a mortal threat.

There's something else to this proverb about eternity: its medium. The message isn't just scrawled like graffiti — it's scrawled in lipstick, which suggests, on the one hand, a more intimate relationship between the message and the human body, and, on the other, the idea that the message about eternity is hardly eternal itself. Lipstick sticks, but not (one hopes) permanently. And it's not just poems and lipstick: the same can be said about every made thing. Beneath the impermanence of the made thing persists the durability of matter. We ourselves are matter, but our bodies and our consciousness resemble made things in at least one crucial respect: they can be unmade.

The place where matter acquires the capacity to think is what's known colloquially in the philosophy of mind as the hard problem, and it's also the place where that most durable of traditional religious notions, the soul, resides. This is where our Night Clerk is headed, with his passkey and his matches, but one gets the sense that this pathetic figure is not quite going to make it there. He can't even figure out the sounds in his own Roach Hotel. There are no passkeys to eternity — at least not yet — and if there were, he might need something more than a book of matches to see into the dark of the beyond. Still, his self-awareness makes him at least a credible, if touchingly limited figure. He says that he "better" get the passkey and the matches, which means that he knows what will happen if he doesn't: he'll be lost looking for eternity.

As one reads this book, eternity seems less like a problem to be solved in heroic fashion than an enabling condition to be worked through. This sounds reminiscent of a child's relationship to its parents, so it's no accident that the last poem in the book is called "Eternity's Orphans":

One night you and I were walking
The moon was so bright
We could see the path under the trees.
Then the clouds came and hid it
So we had to grope our way
Till we felt the sand under our bare feet
And heard the pounding waves.

Do you remember telling me,
"Everything outside this moment is a lie"?
We were undressing in the dark
Right at the water's edge
When I slipped the watch off my wrist
And without being seen or saying
Anything in reply, I threw it into the sea.

These poems and this poet are caught in a bind; ostensibly secular, they also long for the sacred to redeem a fallen world. Our speaker echoes the ritual abolition of time by throwing his watch into the sea, but this anonymous gesture won't solve the problem of eternity for him or anyone else. The position is as familiar as it is unsatisfying. If it's true that we have been orphaned by eternity, we can decide to go looking for our parents or we can do our best to ignore them. It's far from clear, though, whether thinking of ourselves as orphaned in this way will ever allow us to become grown-ups ourselves.

V. Joshua Adams is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago and the editor ofChicago Review.