Wagner's "O sink hiernieder, nach der Liebe" from Tristan und Isolde approaches something like religious music, but not of a type one would hear in church. In it, one senses something of the sacred, but not the eternal, or at least not in the religious sense. On the contrary, at every moment, one feels it slipping away, which makes it all the more precious. In it, fulfilment and loss are experienced simultaneously, and this has its own kind of eternity: eternal loss, finite eternity. It is not the feeling of having something and then losing it - the inevitability and the necessity of this loss imply that this loss was beginning before the creation of the universe, into an eternal past as well as an eternal future, that the moment of enjoyment was at once the moment of keenest longing. More: one desires the loss, as the culmination and completion of longing.

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