That Our Affections Carry Themselves Beyond Us

Those who accuse men of always gaping after future things, and teach us to take hold of present goods, and settle ourselves in them, as having no hold of that which is to come — much less than we have of that which is already past — have hit upon the most common of human errors. But the passion runs deeper than they suppose. We do not merely reach forward into the future we will live to see; we reach beyond death itself, concerning ourselves with what will be said of us when we are no longer there to hear it.

There is something laughable, and yet entirely human, in a man making arrangements for his funeral, worrying about the cut of the cloth on the coffin, or dictating the words of his epitaph. He acts as though he will be present to observe whether his wishes are carried out — as though reputation, after death, could still be felt, like warmth or cold. The soul that will have left the body cannot bruise itself against insult, nor warm itself on praise.

“We are never at home, but always beyond ourselves. Fear, desire, and hope push us towards the future, robbing us of the feeling and consideration of what is, to amuse us with what shall be — even when we ourselves shall be no more.”

And yet I confess I am not free of this. I write these essays with a thought — however foolish — to what posterity may make of them. A man who has spent his life refusing vanity will find it waiting for him at the door when he is dying. We tell ourselves we write for ourselves alone, and it is half true. The other half is that we write to be read by people not yet born, to persist in some small form past the hour of our dissolution.

Perhaps this impulse is not entirely to be despised. What we call love of glory is at bottom a love of continuity — the wish that something of what we valued, what we thought and felt, might survive its occasion. It is the same impulse that makes a man plant a tree whose shade he will never sit under. The foolishness lies not in the impulse but in allowing it to govern us, to make us miserable about things that, by definition, we will never experience.