In the 2004 film Troy, Achilles (Brad Pitt) says to Briseis (Rose Byrne):
“I’ll tell you a secret, something they don’t teach you in your temple. The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”
From the song “Spirits” by The Strumbellas:
“I don’t want a never ending life, I just want to be alive while I’m here.”
Is there such thing as an infinite man, or is he God? Does infinite imply the other qualities: omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent?
Assuming not, what does man’s behavior look like subjected to infinity?
A fun hypothetical: What would you do if you died tomorrow? But I want to consider the other extreme: What would you do if you never died? Nothing, I think.
Mortal men strive to live forever: to reproduce, to create classics, to be remembered. Living forever, for what would man strive?
In infinity, surely man would strive, but then again, maybe not, saying to himself, “Eventually.” But eventually might never come.
Assuming inevitability in infinity, lazy and unmotivated by an otherwise foreseeable end, anything, the happening of which would seem to have been inevitable, might never happen.
It is similar, I think, to omniscience: What would you decide, if you knew everything? There would be no pros and cons, no probability, no hypotheses. If everything is known, all decisions are obvious; in some sense, they’re all already made.
Death, then, is a useful tool to hold in our minds, contemplating the impending proof of our mortality, urging us to live swiftly. In this way, death is God’s great gift to humanity (which He himself cannot partake in), that we might be forced by time to live.