On Immortality
Who do you think you are?
There is no immortality.
Immortality is impossible.
Everything dies.
Writers who claim to immortality by their body of work?
Two generations tops.
But what if you’re a great writer?
Your work could last hundreds of years.
If you are truly great, a thousand years.
The culling process of time is cruel and relentless.
What about Plato, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching?
They have lasted millennia.
But nothing can be saved forever.
One day the library will burn.
There were great works, immortal works, before these were written.
Mankind has long existed
And long has it thought
And of these thoughts
We know nothing.
They are dead.
But
The ideas renew in us.
Stories are reinvented, retold
Concepts are worked out anew
The same mistakes get made
Over
And over
It is a parent’s pain
To watch a child stumble through life
It is our pain
That each generation must live a war
It is a country’s pain
To bloat, to weaken, to topple
It is a people’s pain
To forget.
In the end the sun will burn us out.
After that the universe will collapse.
And some say
A new universe will be born
And the same mistakes made over again.
We will all be forgotten.
We all only have one life.
We can’t even impress who we really are
On our closest friends.
An identity is transient
It changes with each emotion.
How then can a life be remembered?
How can a great work of art
No matter how perfect
No matter how true
No matter how it affects the people
Each person will read into it
What matches their feelings at the time.
One may read the same book
Two, three different times
And feel something different each time.
Nobody knows exactly what you felt when you wrote it.
No one can ever know.
You don’t even know.
Every new thought, your old thought dies.
Every new cell, your old cells die.
You want immortality?
You with the ever changeable identity
Which you deem so important?
You, who are already dead?
