This spring, coming back to Holland
after a wonderful carefree winter in Taiwan
and Japan
Since I live nearby the
eye of the storm as it were, I have been sending brief ‘reports’ by email to a
few concerned friends. One of them was written shortly after an unflinching conversation
in which the possibility of stopping medication was considered. Such discussions
involve whatever one does or does not think about The Last Things, and in
relating the main points in writing, I found myself formulating with unusual
succinctness my own view as of right now (I’m 68).
In Dutch, what I said
was: ‘Ik geloof persoonlijk dat het fysiek-belichaamde leven noch het enige,
noch het beste leven is dat er is. Wat de meeste mensen het "sterven" noemen en
ik liever The Great Upload, is niet het einde ergens van. Het is het verder waarmaken
van een wijder perspectief.’
Then I got to
translating it into English. What I came up with was: ‘Personally, I do not
believe that physically embodied life is either the only or the best life there
is. What most people call "dying" and I prefer to call The Great Upload, is not
the end of anything. It is the continuing substantiation of a wider
perspective.’
As so often, although I
felt the translation was a pretty good representation of what I meant,
something had been lost in the process. The Dutch word ‘waarmaken,’ which I
made into ‘substantiation,’ can or does indeed mean ‘substantiate,’ as well as ‘live
up to’ in the sense of ‘living up to a promise.’ But the very structure of the
word, its being a combination of ‘waar’ meaning ‘true’ and ‘maken’ meaning ‘make’...somehow
conveys an added glint of ‘making it true,’ making something which was only
potential into an actuality.
Does this mean I think
you have to die before you become immortal? Certainly not. Like William Blake,
I believe the apps that enable our immortality, so to speak, are already
installed and running during our life in this visible world. Normally we are
not aware of them because the shine or glare of immediate exigencies bears in
on us more insistently. But let’s defer that discussion for later. Or for
Later...
--Lloyd Haft
April 14, 2015