We falter, pass it on to our children, lay out our bones, fall away, are lost, forgotten. We inch it forward with each beat of heart, give to it the work of hand, of mind. Depends it on us utterly, yet we know it not. On our shoulders, in our eyes, in anguished hands through unclear realm, into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation, we bear its full weight. ![]() What changes to produce new structures as life evolves is not the momentary excrescence but the hereditary arrangements within the thread. Numberless thickenings have appeared on it, have flourished and have fallen away as we now fall away. The end of the thread lies now in our children, extends back through us, unbroken, unfathomably into the past. We flourish for a moment, achieve a bit of singing and dancing, a few memories we would carve in stone, then we wither, twist out of shape. Our task is to bear it forward, pass it on. The end of the thread now lies buried within, shielded, inviolate. Cells proliferate, become an excrescence, assume the shape of a man. We come into being as a slight thickening at the end of a long thread. Wheelis - who anchored his worldview in the insistence that life “escapes reason” - considers the abiding relationship between matter and spirit: Cook from a rare 1913 English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. ![]() I see my soul reflected in Nature by Margaret C. The psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis (October 23, 1915–June 14, 2007) brings an uncommonly lyrical perspective to this eternal perplexity in his 1975 book On Not Knowing How to Live ( public library). A generation after him, the poetic physicist Richard Feynman marveled at our inheritance as “atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.” In the age of AI - this precarious prosthesis of our consciousness - the question of what makes us human, a question of matter and spirit, rattles us with ever more disquieting urgency. “Blessed be you, mighty matter,” the French theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote as he set out to reconcile the two. We live as cells winged with sentience, filaments with feeling - creatures tasked with comprehending the ceaseless dialogue between our materiality and our spirituality, tasked with living it.
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