An entire life yields no more importance than an elementary school time capsule. One day, this life be as relevant as the inside jokes you told when you were in kindergarten. Not even nostalgia will redeem it, just like those potty jokes.
It will be such a distant memory as to have no more significance than a dream. Enough time passes and the salience of earlier events erodes entirely. You’re no longer nostalgic for childhood friends after raising a family. By the same token, when this life comes to a close, events from the past will matter no more than fiction.
You crack open the time capsule at the end to see what you’ve reaped. You realize it’s empty. Not literally, but metaphorically. It contains hundreds of artifacts that at some point or another were sources of meaning in your life. Now, it’s like staring blankly at some scribbles in a foreign language, completely inscrutable. The meaning was never in the objects of course, but now you can’t even rekindle the memories that would make sense of all this junk. A transient feeling, a fleeting rainbow — like trying to take a picture of a particular smell.
This thought keeps capturing me when waking from deep dreams in the middle of the night. In that groggy twilight, the dream I just had carries more weight than actual distant memories. The passage of time undermines the distinction between memory and imagination. It all slowly diffuses into the same faint, dreamlike story about the past.
We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. ‘Imperishable monuments’ and ‘immortal deeds,’ death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect.
That is the sting of it, that in the vast driftings of the cosmic weather, tho many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved — even as our world now lingers, for our joy-yet when these transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely nothing remains, of represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught that may come after, to make it care for similar ideals. This utter final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism at present understood. The lower and not the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution which we can definitely see.
