"In Scipio's dream, Africanus tells Scipio, that what you do, the political life you lead and honors of statesman you will get, will be rewarded by the contemplative life in the afterlife. You will learn the harmony of cosmos. And in the face of such eternity, the honors and riches of political life do not seem to be significant."

'But doesn't that go for philosophy as well? That honors of a statesman have not survived through time is no different than that thoughts of a philosopher did not survive because none of their texts survived. It's only by some freak chance these thoughts were passed down.'

'The fickleness of becoming 'eternal' to our collective human consciousness of something, that's merely by chance. But besides that, in the face of eternity, everything seems useless anyway. "What for, what for?" '

'Why do we long so much to be eternal? I think it's probably precisely because we are not, and probably never will be. We are mortal. Eternity is not what we can neither be nor understand. To fight that, I conjecture, we write, we think, we conquer, to be, in ways, remembered. Even if you didn't seek social recognition, you wrote to remember and to communicate. That's an attachment to memory and thought.'

'But nothing we write, we think, and we conquer will let us be eternal- because we are mortal. We will die, and what we have produced will only survive by chance, and then it will only be understood to less and less relevance as well as reverence as time moves on.'

'So what do we do? Mortals desiring eternal to no avail? Nothing that life has allowed us to know, nothing that life offers, is eternal. So how are we to, within our lives, attain or even deal with eternity, even the idea of eternity? How do we break out of our own very existence?'

'Creativity?'


Mothagesso.