Why I am not Ovid, or Dante, or Petrarch.

When the old writers talk of glory, I know what they mean, and I suppose I want it for some of the same reasons: securing my own immortality, bolstering my own pride. The way I look at it, though, I want to be influential chiefly to help other people, in a very basic way. My sister is right: I'm a good little secular humanist, at least in the way I conduct myself, and I basically like human beings. I think they're basically miracles of God which, yes, contradicts the "secular" bit. The thing about humanity is that it has a lifespan, the entire race and planet have life spans, and they are transient, but they are still part of creation, this great, marvelous, truly unknown thing that I stand in awe of all my life. I can't help but think this creation is divine for its beauty and complexity. The odds are so slim that it happened by chance that God seems like a more sensible answer.

But about the afterlife, I am uncertain. I believe in literary immortality, and it is a kind of belief, that I, like the Athenian soldiers of Thucydides' history, might live on with no shrine but the hearts of men; but how can a soul continue when, by nature, it appears that a soul is only the firing of neurons in just such a way, the arrangement of cells exactly so? This is how it seems these days, with technology as it is, but even this I must regard as miraculous. How could a *person* arise from electricity and a few million lipid bubbles?

And that extends, naturally, to all life, to everything which makes Earth a green planet. Think of your own witnessed marvels. I'm sure you have them to draw upon, and I have my own.

Mankind is part of this world, which I love, and Mankind itself is capable of good things. My tack on helping out is not complicated: stretch the moment of Man and Earth's greatness, even as it flickers, and no matter how loudly the eternal footman is laughing. There is something beautiful here. There is something worth sheltering as long as possible, even if it must burn out someday. When God gave Man mastery of the Earth, He also gave him a will to act outside of His decree, and we are so far outside right now. So far that we're destroying our brilliant little jewel of creation, our warm corner of the universe, our insane improbability or gracious gift of God.

I want to tell people to rein it in, because I love them, because I love Earth. I feel like it's hard to be purely egotistical as one of six billion plus. "Daddy, Daddy! It's just like you said. Now that the living outnumber the dead, I am one of many.

"Speak my language." -Laurie Anderson