"The awful importance of this life is that it determines eternity"

Awful does not mean monstrous here so much as awe-full: weighty, solemn, charged with consequence. The line insists that our brief, ordinary span carries a gravity that outstrips its length. The hours we spend, the loyalties we keep or betray, the loves we cultivate or neglect become more than episodes; they set the trajectory of what endures. Under a theological lens, that endurance is the soul’s destiny before God, where habits harden into character and character into a kind of permanence. In a broader frame, eternity can name the long reverberations of our actions through other lives, cultures, and even the planet, outliving our calendars and biographies.

Such a view relocates urgency from crises to the everyday. The decisive moments are not only the dramatic crossroads but the repeated, quiet choices, telling the truth when it costs, forgiving when it wounds, noticing the person the world ignores. Each decision chisels the self and leaves a trace in others. Time here is not only quantity (chronos) but opportune quality (kairos): occasions ripe with meaning, whose acceptance or refusal matters forever in ways we may never fully see.

There is both hope and dread in this. Hope, because no act of goodness is wasted; the smallest fidelity participates in something imperishable. Dread, because negligence and cruelty also persist, and the bill for them comes due. Yet “determines” need not imply mechanistic fatalism. Trajectory can change. Repentance, reconciliation, and grace can reroute a life already in motion. The weight of the present does not crush; it summons.

The line is therefore a protest against trivialization. It resists living by distraction, procrastination, or cynicism, and calls for attentiveness to what truly forms us. To live under an eternal horizon is not perfectionism but stewardship: of time, attention, relationships, and hope. Live as if what you love will last, because, in some mysterious way, it does.