Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only fo... — Abraham Lincoln

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

Author: Abraham Lincoln

Insight: There's something deeply human about wanting to believe we're built for something bigger than our own small lifetimes. Lincoln's intuition here taps into a feeling most of us have had—that sense of reaching for ideas, beauty, or meaning that seems to stretch beyond what makes practical sense for a creature that only lives seventy or eighty years. Why would we be wired to contemplate eternity, to love people we know we'll lose, to care about problems we won't live to see solved? But here's the tension worth sitting with: we don't actually need immortality for Lincoln's point to hold. The fact that we can think about infinity, that we experience longing for permanence even though we're temporary—that's remarkable enough on its own. It's not proof of an afterlife so much as proof that we're creatures caught between two worlds. We're stuck with enough imagination to want forever but enough awareness to know we won't get it. Maybe that gap is exactly what gives life its texture. We create, love, and build things that outlast us precisely because we're mortal. We pass something forward. That's not immortality in the sense Lincoln meant, but it's not nothing either. It's the closest thing to permanence we actually get.

Source: Herndon's Lincoln, p. 355