I'll be leaving for Korea on Friday morning, so things are going to be hectic until after the weekend. Hell, they're hectic now, and I should be at home getting ready instead of sitting here in the Pourhouse typing. But that's procrastination!
Meanwhile, I found this at Homo Superior, and the link indicated that it had come from Andrew Sullivan.
That couldn't be the Catholic-American Sullivan, I thought. When I clicked through, it turned out I was right: he was quoting a letter from a reader. It's quite good stuff. All I can add is Wittgenstein's Tractatus (6.3412), "[I]s some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?"The Christian notion of eternal life just doesn’t make any sense to me. I can’t conceive of how I could be “me” without the context of the world I live in, the relationships I have, and my time and place. That would be some other person. To be an ego without a world is to be nothing. I think when you have a better understanding that our existence as personalities in this world is already ephemeral, even while we are alive, it makes regret for our disappearance seem peculiar.
As Rilke says, we are “transpositions of air”.