Ad Infinitum

by James L. Kramer

Thoughts lead into thoughts and those in turn to others as if the imagination revolves with ideas, each waiting to appear. Existence, a constant repetition, continues as idle thoughts and dreams: the significance of what was dreamt a yesterday has been forgotten and what dreams fill tonight will be unrecalled tomorrow. Those thousands of faces we have seen cannot be recognized and all those with whom we have spent our lives we never knew. What at a time was vividly read and talked about has faded in our memory until, undistinguishable, it is taken from us. The words of the great poets still sound while our memory, a brief echo, diminishes into the hollow. Perennial memory, like some reluctant precipitate, slowly dissolves in time while we await, past remembrance, among the dead. Yet hope transcends death, reducing it to a mere termination, and in memory men continue to live, although they must finally die in a later history. only time continues undisturbed and, having no beginning, will have no end.