“This is the mystery…it reveals to us that all those beings living at the present moment contain within them the actual germ of all which will live in the future, and that these therefore in a certain sense exist already. So that every animal in the full prime of life seems to call to us: ‘Why do you lament the transitoriness of living things? How could I exist if all those of my species which came before me had not died?’
However much the plays and the masks on the world’s stage may change it is always the same people who appear. We sit together and talk and grow excited, and our eyes glitter and our voices grow shriller: just so did others sit and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the same people: and it will be just so a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us from perceiving this is time.”