Just what is it we think we’ll spend eternity doing?

Indie darling and violin virtuoso Kishi Bashi concluded his otherwise bright and joyful 2014 album Lighght with the hauntingly dark “In Fantasia,” a track about vampires slowly spreading across the earth (“One by one we build an empire/where devils roam and breed…”). As per the vampire lore, they cannot go out till the sun sets (“Fading sunsets/to forget them is the mark of death”), so they mostly go out hunting during the long nights of late-Fall and winter (“When the winters help the golden autumns take it’s leave/Opens passages for vampires/To suck and feed…”) They are especially able to thrive even in modern times, due to our self-centered pride and general lack of faithfulness–not only to God but to each other–blinding us to the dangers in our midst (“Waking insights born of jealousy and faithlessness/Gave us strength among the gentiles of modernity…”). Implicitly, the vampires end up conquering the world.

But their victory ends up being an empty one; in the closing verses, Kishi Bashi heavily insinuates that the vampires have continued to persist until the stars have disappeared from the sky after the heat death of the cosmos sometime in the next 100 trillion years (“Endless twilight/if only stars would show their faithful stare…”), when the earth has died and the atmosphere disappeared and their decrepit castles now sit in endless darkness (“the air is dense to me it hurts to scream/At windless castles in the darkness, too faint to see…”). It is an immensely melancholy ending to what had up till then been a very upbeat album.

But then, what else was ever going to happen to these vampires? If one chooses to live forever, does that not in fact signify that one also perforce chooses to live till long after the human race, the earth, even the stars themselves all cease to exist? Will not the darkness last infinitely longer than the lights of the stars ever existed? Is that not their curse?

But then again, it is also a core doctrine of our religion that we are supposed to live forever as well–and that not in endless darkness, but in light everlasting. But still the same question persists: just what will we spend that eternity doing? The hymn “Amazing Grace”–at long last added to our own hymnbook this last year–finishes with “When we’ve been there 10,000 years/bright shining as the sun…” but even that feels too short-sighted. What of the next 10,000 years after that? And the next 100,000 years? 1,000,000 years? 1,000,000,000 years? The next trillion? 100 trillion? Quadrillion? Quintilian? Because each of those unfathomable, inconceivably massive units of time will also only be a an infinitesimal fraction of the eternity we confront. What, then, will we finally do in that endless amount of time that will not end up making us feel like the forsaken vampires screaming without air in windless castles lost in the starless night as in the Kishi Bashi song?

A slightly more mainstream version of the same (relatively speaking) is “Pet Sematary” by the Ramones, which featured in closing credits of the 1989 Horror flick of the same name, based upon the Stephen King novel of the same name. The story goes that King was actually a massive Ramones fan himself and invited the band over to his home in Maine while they were on tour in New England, where bassist Dee Dee Ramone penned the lyrics in just under an hour. Ironically, this quickly dashed-off soundtrack song went on to become those old Punk Rock pioneers’ highest charting hit in the U.S.

The novel and film, recall, are about a mysterious Indian burial ground (is there any other kind?) in Maine, where if you bury your recently-deceased cat or dog or even a human being, they will return to life but in a more monstrous, murderous form. The action of the story comes from what happens when a father sees his young son hit by a car near his house, and the horrific lengths he goes to to evade his grief. The Ramones track, however, largely eschews with plot summary in the verses, which are primarily populated by typical Halloween-season signifiers and cliches. The aching heart of the song, then, comes in the chorus, when Joey Ramone sings simply and plaintively, “I don’t want to be buried/In a Pet Sematary/I don’t want to live my life again.” It’s not the prospect of returning to life as a murderous ghoul that most horrifies him, but of coming back at all.

In this, the Ramones were wiser than the vampires in the Kishi Bashi song: what exactly is the end point of living again (let alone living forever) if all it ever promises is more of the same? Again, at some point in those endless 10,000, 100,000, million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion years, won’t we just wish that we had simply ceased existing entirely?

Joseph Smith has taken quite a bit of rhetorical abuse, not just from his innumerable critics among the other Christian sects but even by some well-meaning critics of the King Follet Discourse within our own Church, for his suggestion that the long-range destiny of the human race is for each and every one of us to become Gods ourselves, creating entire universes and populating them with spirit children who will also one day be raised up to become Gods themselves. But whenever I listen to something like “In Fantasia” and “Pet Sematary,” or read something like Stephen L. Peck‘s excellent A Short Stay in Hell, I increasingly consider that the only satisfactory explanation for how we will spend eternity that does not end up sounding like hell itself, is that we will engage in endless acts of creation, for the express of lifting up others. It is the polar opposite of what the vampires spend eternity doing (not to mention what the vast majority of spend our brief lives just doing now); it is the only thing that makes living again sound like it’s worth it. All other explanations fall short–infinitely short.