To thine own self be true

Reference: All Men Are Mortal, Simone de Beauvoir.

Fosca is incapable of looking past death. He sees it everywhere and in everyone. How painful must it be to see the transient nature of life in loved ones? Al once said that people are productive because they must distract themselves from the inevitability death. But in de Beauvoir's book, death is a prepossessing concept to the immortal one. Oddly, the ones who shall die after so few summers do not think about death. They think about purpose and meaning. Life, however, loses all its meaning when it becomes infinite. So does it naturally follow that we give meaning to what we do because we can't do it all? Perhaps the choices we make become who we are not because of what we picked but because of the possibilities we left behind. So if we don't make our own choices then we are not facing up to the limits of life. Is that denying authenticity, living in bad faith as the existentialist would say?

Time limits the number of books I can read. Time necessitates that I make a choice about my career. The choices always sacrifice the possibilities. But if I can have all the time in the world and can claim all possibilities, I am everything and nothing. I no longer exist.