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I took a walk through life, and came uncomfortably to its conclusion. In a parking lot emptied of its day travelers who packed the foul weather gear in their cars and drove home before the sun had stopped compensating for the cold. I have no car here, no ride home. Just a summit of sorts they say I fell from when I was born, and I wonder what all the trouble was for. Those who make pilgrimages to this place don't know the desolation of death. They come for the scenery, the far away abstracted peace of the destination they mistake for the journey's reward. I see, now, from this distance, all that time and obstinance have denied me. All that I once had, held, let go, and left behind. I lived in expectations, and experience was the road that led to them. But each dissolved with the touch and all I see now is the road, meandering in mystery and disappearing into the dusk.

We're all working on our legacy, but, seriously, legacies are overrated. No one would recognize themselves in the caricatures and the biographies which took their places when the memories died with those who knew them. Even the reflections are false, and if our friends were all talented writers able to capture our essence in words, the person each knew would be different from all the others, and none of them would be us. There is no such thing as metempsychosis, the transference of self, the transmigration of the soul, and life after death. The self is as transient and insubstantial as a dream. The soul was conjured in the desolation of a fractured world, divided into the domestic and the natural. The universe and its agents of cause and observation, the gods and the autonomous selves, were all manufactured to appease the wild in us, and make us civilized. God and Self is a circular argument and the wheel of artifice which, with its turning, reduces the universe to someth...

Nature or nurture is a silly argument, and shows just how far down the rabbit hole of reason we've descended. Darwin made death the most essential tool of evolution. The rest was chance, another roll of the dice every time a cell divides. Epidemics and extinctions were the hammer and nail held in reserve for when a screw wouldn't do. We seem to have been made facilitators of the next Big Death by the endowment of our ancestors' inclination to sacrifice themselves to a fiction sustained by their belief. We, and the world, will one day die for the glory of God, Allah, Jesus, the Lizard King, or simply an idea, an ideology, a cleansing truth that rids the world of its pestilent facts, its wearisome reality.

We think that civilization has made the world more complex, and that we, as individuals, long for simpler times. Complexity is a word we use in place of drudgery , the labor we are obliged to do, the pointless decisions and ridiculous choices we have to make before we are allowed to rest quietly. And we relax by doing real work, by putting ourselves in a situation of real complexity, where every decision can mean physical discomfort, serious injury, or even death. We make ourselves vulnerable so that our labor and our choices mean something. We go camping. We play video games. We invest our happiness in outcomes ruled by chance. In the daily drudge of daily life, everything we do, for many if not most of us, is entirely artificial, and is made urgent and necessary by artificial forces whose real purpose is to keep us perpetually busy, with little or no time for quiet reflection or conscious attention. The world we've made is anything but complex. It is in fact absurdly simple...

Like most futurists, he misses the point*, not of why we're concerned about the future (which is clearly all about legacy and immortality, hubris and paradise) but of why we even have a concept of the future, why we spatialize time as a journey from chaos to perfection, from darkness to brilliance, from void to infinity. Why we aren't happy with the permanent present. Why we are obsessed with oracles, auguries, signs, and mathematical formulas that predict what will come to pass. No one has, or ever will, escape the present without the rest of us, and everything else, waiting there when they arrive. It's as if the universe anticipates every move by every traveler, and beats them to their destination. The future is a fantasy whether anticipated or remembered. It is no more, and no less real than memory. But every animal has memory. My dog knows me, and has cataloged a world richer in smell than any world I could conceive in sight. The difference is that I remember memory...

Stand is a very old word, linked directly to the Indo-European word whose English descendants include nearly every word that begins or ends with st . The fixed stars got their name from the ancient word that conveyed staying put, standing by, and is now the -stan in all countries like Afghani stan an Paki stan . It is the stage upon which the action occurs. It is all things at rest , and all things real are sub stan tial, i.e., derived from the changeless, eternal, permanent truth. It's no coincidence that we call them stones , and that when we are astounded , we stop what we're doing and stand , staring like a statue . Conversely, we haven't inherited an equally ancient word for things that don't stay put, which move and change. We describe them only as having been perturbed out of their natural state by some outside influence, some cause to which their restlessness can be attributed. This is, perhaps, one of the deepest and most intractable concepts in th...