Gravestones

By the ethic of virtue, we learn that our most fundamental concern is being the best sort of person we can, such that all of our chosen actions and their consequences should be of the best quality of which we are capable. By the ethic of utility, we learn rather to concern ourselves most fundamentally with the consequences themselves, since proclaiming the best of intentions from beneath the rubble achieves nothing more than self-indulgence.

A thing in the world is so solid, after all, so confident in what it is and how it fits in creation that it doesn't even have need of personality to be maintained; it just is, like the greatest ambition of a navel-gazing monk on a mountaintop. The self, by contrast, is a slippery maze of melting walls that trembles to its core with every step you take in pursuit of its escape; it is death incarnate, this consciousness, for in all creation the only thing which may ever truly end is the conception of a thing by a mind in contemplation, and the ego is shaped by the dismissal of possibilities.

All people will die before the scope of eternity, as every mountain will be scattered to the winds that never cease, but to prize the self over its products is not to reasonably sustain any hope of immortality. It is not that you will live forever if you never compromise, for indeed the human frame is a more fragile thing than a mountain, but rather that you will survive THIS day, that the thing your body wakes and remembers to be tomorrow will not be remembered as less than you are today, will not be disillusioned of those truths to which illusions are the lifeblood.

Investing your self in the works of the world is no shortcut to immortality, nor even a trick to protract it beyond the endurance of your flesh.  The castles of sand we build are not Us, but our memorials, the testaments to all that we've left behind us while still alive. Gravestones, grand and shiny and guaranteed to persist though the seas rise and the sun consumes us all, can still only ever say who we were.