=1 "Immortality =1"
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Immortality =1
A single individual life rarely makes any sense, but our artistic need and our romantic biographical literature will invariably try to give it an independent meaning. Yet it is rather like a little part of a great curve which has suddenly become visible, as that of a meteor, which also has its explanation, its history and its continuation in the invisible part of the curve.
The varied relations, the numerous meetings of a human life constitute so many segments of curves which necessarily must be completed to have a significance in the eternity of becoming. A single instrumental note of music, even the most beautiful, remains a note. What we want to hear is the concerto.
The life of our great men, even romanticized, always leaves us a little unsatisfied: one would always like to hear the next note. To be music there must be a next note, and this whole universe is music.
The degree of identification with the whole of life is the index of our immortality. As long as there is a single atom we are not, we are not wholly immortal. There is a story in Teutonic mythology illustrating this concept, the story of Baldur.
Baldur the beautiful, the youngest and most beloved of the gods, had a bad dream, and as a result he was afraid he would die. So the gods asked all the animals and all the plants and all the minerals to promise not to hurt him. All promised. But the measly little mistletoe, because it grew neither on earth nor in heaven but in between, they forgot to ask. And so it happened that Loki, the god who can find the hidden chinks in your personal truth and its therefore called the father of lies, found out, and Baldur was slain...
If there is a single thing in the universe with which you do not feel one, it will kill you. If there is a single soul you think will disappear, bang! goes your own immortality. Only in the oneness of all can we be immortal. Nothing can be annihilated, nothing can die, and to be immortal has a meaning only in relationship with everything else. A strictly segregated immortality in the privacy of your own little being would have no meaning. Immortality can only be in communion, where all are equally immortal.