In Revelation 20:11-12 we read the following:
And I saw a great white throne with one seated on it, from whose face
fled the earth and the heavens, and no place was found for them.
And I saw the dead both great and small standing before the throne.
And books were opened….
I found this interesting because we see that this meeting has no location — heaven and earth have fled (and no place was found for them). The notion that a place is constituted by those who are present there is an idea I picked up from Robert Farrar Capon. In particular, I believe I found it in the following passage from his book An Offering of Uncles, pp. 5-9.
I have a recurrent fantasy. The characters in it sometimes change, but the metaphysical substance is always the same. It begain a few years ago when my wife looked up from her mending to remark that, for a man in my profession, it would be more seemly if something other than the seat of my pants wore out first. The comment, I felt, had an edge to it. She knew perfectly well that I said my prayers standing, since I invariably fall asleep when I kneel. I found myself taking umbrage. Perhaps I felt guilty at not being heroic enough to kneel without leaning on a chair, or perhaps I was just parrying; but, at any rate, I gave her a short disquisition on the sedentary age we live in, and I ended with the comment that she did ill to complain — that in all probability every housewife in America was engaged in a ceaseless and noble struggle to close the wounds that civilization was inflicting upon our trousers.
It was the thought of that transcontinental concert of trouser seats being worn away that led to the metaphysical dimension. From the attrition of the pants it was only a step to the attrition of the men inside the pants. I would look at people I knew with the strange feeling that, through the seat of their pants, they themselves were being worn away — a little bit every year — so that it was a race with death to see if there would be anything left of them to bury. I would wonder what could be done to stop the attrition — whether, for example, we would, as a race, have to give up sitting in the interest of self-preservation. But then I saw that the avoidance of sitting wouldn’t help at all, because the wearing was not being caused by the places people sat in, but by the fact that they were not sitting in places at all: they were set on top of a slowly grinding placelessness. Do you see what I mean? If the seats they sat in were places, they would destroy only cloth; but because they are noplace, they wear out people.
One of the characters in the fantasy may help to explain it: The Man on the Thruway. I would see him driving a late model car from Buffalo to Albany. The inside of it was typically nowhere. It used to be that the driver’s seat of an automobile was a recognizable place: the control room of a traveling machine. But no more. There are still knobs and gauges, but they have fewer and fewer necessary connection with the inside of the car as someplace. Half of them operate devices that could be anywhere: radio, cigarette lighters; the rest control a machine that practically drives itself. And the gauges. The old ammeters and manometers are gone. They have been supplanted by apocalyptic little lights which give the driver no useful information about the place he is in: they simply announce accomplished disasters. And the principal gauge of all, opulently central, tells him only the speed at which he is missing other places. He sits on sleek vinyl covers, his feet touch deep carpet; acoustical ceilings cover him, music embraces him. It all whispers to him — tells him perhaps that he is a tiger or a king, but in no known forest, over no real kingdom. Nothing says where he is — and nothing can. He is noplace.
He passes signs: Syracuse, Schenectady; he passes mile posts: 176; 189. They mean nothing to him. Place is irrelevant; distances have become times. Albany is two more hours; food is fifteen minutes. He passes scenery: trees, lawns. But it, too, is nowhere — the same grass, endless from Buffalo to Albany. He looks ahead: what is that? It is a bridge; but what bridge, in what place, he does not know. He looks aside: What is this? It is a cloverleaf — anywhere, and, therefore, nowhere. It is all real; but it has ceased to matter. The placelessness grinds into his soul. He grows thinner.
He stops to eat, stepping from nowhere into nowhere. The thruway restaurant is another sacrament of his placelessness. The same broadloom stretches wall to wall; the same vinyl upholstery bears him up. Music floats mindlessly in the dead room. He orders the same food he ate after Buffalo, served by the same waitress. He pays and leaves: out past familiar trash cans full of french fry bags and milkshake containers. The same flies buzz over them in the heat. He struggles to find his car, tries several doors before he finds one to fit his key, and drops with relief into nowhere again. He feels thinner still, but he is headed home.
He races against the nothingness that wears him away. Home at least may save him, build him, stop the attrition. A singular wife, a peculiar brood, local sandwiches, personal garbage. Places, things; fragments to shore against his ruin, props to lift him from the grindstone. He sits again and eats, and he begins ever so slightly to thicken. Unique and private voices speak to him, discrete and personal hands touch him. He struggles to place himself, to become something, somewhere. But the pain is too great. The voices make demands, and the hands will not be controlled. The grinding was easier to bear. He goes to his living room to relax.
Broadloom once more enfolds him; the vinyl enters into his soul. He sits again in noplace, and the last thin part of him wears down forever. He turns the knobs of the television. Sound swells from the dark oblong frame, the picture flickers on, and in the unechoing room he watches — and sleeps. Late at night his wife comes to switch off the set, but it is too late. Nowhere has done its work. The picture narrows to a point, burns for an instant, and disappears into the window on the void. In the chair are his clothes: worn trousers, worn shoes. Good enough with a little mending for his funeral; but the man himself is gone.
Nevertheless at the end of the fantasy, I go through the motions of burying him — closed coffin to hide the tragedy. The funeral parlor proclaims his placelessness: broadloom and vinyl are his last country; men without faces bear him out. We drive down placeless roads to a cemetery laid with the grasses of the thruway. The grave is dug and waiting, but the coffin is lowered only slightly; it sways gently in the straps. The words are said, the mourners leave, and on a treeless plain he hangs forever in the air.
Men who have lived nowhere are buried nowhere.
No monument shall mark his head; no local roots clutch his breast.
Richmond and Kew have not undone him; Syracuse and Albany have not destroyed him.
No place wore him away, and nowhere receives him at last.
He shall return no more to his house; neither shall his place know him any more.