Jerry Wellman, through drawings, essays, reveries, and poetry, explores concepts of death and deathlessness. An ongoing project since the passing of his brother, almost 35 years ago, the book is inspired by his investigations of Eastern thought, funerary architecture, poetry, and philosophy.

 

The title for the book, Emblems of Hidden Duration, is directly inspired by the writing of Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza proposes a difference between eternity and durations. He suggests eternity as the place that exists outside time, and that durations exist as a series of overlapping and interconnected events. More recently quantum mechanics theorizes: Physical reality is a stack of events that exist as the ever-changing indefinable now.  The book takes the form of an internal conversation with Wellman himself, at the time of his imagined death.