People change spouses more often than they clean out closets. And every time they say, 'This is the one. This is the person I'm going to spend eternity with.' Then forty or fifty years go by and you're just sick of each other, utterly sick, and it's on to the next 'true love.' My question is what good is eternity if you are eternally falling in and out of love?
Love is nothing more than elevated levels of dopamine, nor-epinephrine, and other chemicals. But the way Uncle Antionio's face lights up as they dance... I wonder what it would be like to feel that. To let the chemicals of romance take over for just a little while. Then I remember that I am immortal and that my body doesn't work like everyone else's. Who knows if I can even feel love?
And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.
Think then what it is to live on here eternally and yet be human; toage in soul and see our beloved die and pass to lands whither we maynot hope to follow; to wait while drop by drop the curse of the longcenturies falls upon our imperishable being, like water slow drippingon a diamond that it cannot wear, till they be born anew forgetful ofus, and again sink from our helpless arms into the void unknowable.
In my recollection, there have been many places and people I have been both blessed and cursed to know. Much joy and heartache can come from immortality, for loneliness can be lethal. I have unfortunately witnessed many I cared for, both mortal and not, perish. I have never been able to own anything that was truly mine. Once, I possessed everything, but many moons have come since that time. -- Sacha Borishauski
This trespass had not come without a price. Living un-lives, material comforts and luxuries became superfluous, connection to the outside world undesirable, and power their only sustenance. But they had paid gladly, considering this “humanity” a small price for the power they now wielded; power that would sustain them far beyond the lives of mere humans and perhaps, in time, even grant them immortality.
The 'tragedy' of the slow growth of immortalism pertains mostly to them, and perhaps to you – not so much to me or to us, the committed immortalists. We already have made our arrangements for cryostasis after clinical death – signed our contracts with existing organizations and allocated the money. We will have our chance, and with a little bit of luck will 'taste the wine of centuries unborn'.
What decides whether a man will become immortal, is not his character but his vitality. Nothing save intensity confers immortality. A man manifests himself more vividly, in proportion as he is strong and unified, effective and unique. Immortality knows nothing of morality or immorality, of good or evil; it measures only work and strength; it demands from a man not purity but unity. Here, morality is nothing; intensity, all.
Jaden felt their boredom, their tired eternity. Beyond that, she felt their dying essence. They were immortal—all-powerful beings—and yet they were powerless against the onslaught of ever-changing time. They were lost in a modern world, one they didn’t have the energy to understand. And, in being lost, they were immobilized against it. Not even their judgments could assuage their exhausted wisdom of forever.
She had lost herself in this old work, her personality dissolving into it, so that she had been set free. The immortality of the soul lies in its dissolution; this was the cryptic comment that so frustrated Olivier and which Julien had only ever grasped as evidence for the history of a particular school of thought. He had known all about its history, but Julia knew what it meant. He found the realization strangely reassuring.
True spiritual love is not a feeble imitation and anticipation of death, but a triumph over death, not a separation of the immortal form from the mortal, of the eternal from the temporal, but a transfiguration of the mortal into the immortal, the acceptance of the temporal into the eternal. False spirituality is a denial of the flesh; true spirituality is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead.
Our immediate interests are after all of but small moment. It is what we do for the future, what we add to the sum of man's knowledge, that counts most. As someone has said, 'The individual withers and the world is more and more.' Man dies at 70, 80, or 90, or at some earlier age, but through his power of physical reproduction, and with the means that he has to transmit the results of effort to those who come after him, he may be said to be immortal.
When the silence comes and the echoes of former life fades, what will have mattered will be, one made the world a bit better ‘fore their de-berthing. Writing, needs none, but the initial push of heart and passion, enabling the story to take flight, doves to clouds, clouds to doves, then to faithfully follow its unfolding through the quill transcribed, this self-perpetuating engine once born, with no further fuel required, to lift others in the journey, through time, for all time.
When the silence comes and the echoes of former life fades, what will have mattered will be, one made the world a bit better ‘fore their de-berthing. Writing, needs none, but the initial push of heart and passion, enabling the story to take flight, doves to clouds, clouds to doves, then to faithfully follow its unfolding through the quill transcribed, this self-perpetuating engine once born, with no further fuel required, to lift others in the journey, through time, for all time.
My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.
