'Know
thyself': long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou
wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this
of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou
canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules. That will be thy better
plan."
Yes, but what I work at, will not that too be lost in the end? And if it
be lost, wherefore should I work at it? Yes, yes, it may be that to
accomplish my work--and what is my work?--without thinking about myself,
is to love God. And what is it to love God?
And on the other hand, in loving God in myself, am I not loving myself
more than God, am I not loving myself in God?
What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this
same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium, and without
death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his _Consolatio
ad Marciam_ (xxvi.); what he desired was to live this life again: _ista
moliri_. And what Job asked for (xix. 25-7) was to see God in the flesh,
not in the spirit. And what but that is the meaning of that comic
conception of _eternal recurrence_ which issued from the tragic soul of
poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?
And this beatific vision which is the primary Catholic solution of the
problem, how can it be realized, I ask again, without obliteration of
the consciousness of self? Will it not be like a sleep in which we
dream without knowing what we dream? Who would wish for an eternal life
like that? To think without knowing that we think is not to be sensible
of ourselves, it is not to be ourselves.
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