As Dr. E. has shown, time's a human invention—a convenient illusion. As the body knows, it has no more significance, alone, than width, by itself. But the I has taken time, in most cases, for a universal measurement, notched it in hours and minutes, and set the whole world to counting time. Its mere recognition is subjective. Yet, how few subjects realize that if the subject be a baseball player, and if his subjectivity and objectivity live fifty years—then the subjectivity of Wordsworth, or Emerson, may have lasted for several hundred thousand?
So, in this frame of reference—this truer attitude—even I, compared with some of my timeserving fellow men, may be older than Methuselah.
The body is potentially immortal: it can reproduce itself. And so the I would be immortal in its self-sensation if it were oriented, like the lives of animals, toward that which it could reproduce—all men toward all men yet to be—rather than toward its wretched self-awareness, its greedy, permanent stoppage of time for narcissistic attitudinizing. The I is a mirror. It can see itself forever and any now as this now—if only it looks at the reflection to observe all those behind and all beyond, of which it is an integral. But if it ignores those behind—rules out even the next-lowest author of its instincts—and if it eschews the requirements of those to come which are the integral function of itself—if, that is, the I concentrates upon its one embodied reflection, rejecting the panoply of life and repudiating past and present for its little now—then, truly that I is mortal. It is a suicide for that it is an assassin.
Such are all persons but a very few, these days.
So are they taught.
So inspired: unpunctuality and unproductivity are un-American.
So do they urgently maintain themselves—egoists without the sense of individuation.
And that is why the earth is perishing for man.
In the hatred people have for people.
And the absolute hatred of posterity that rises from the absolute rejection of our real ancestry.