ABSTRACT
The true believers of the counter-culture are as impelled as their forbears whose ancestry they reject by an urge which renders the divergence of Homo sapiens from other mammals so conspicuous. Immortality as experience is civilization thus imaged. Civilization thus imaged, it is, which gives experience the original of the compensating Afterlife imagined and cherished by theologians and philosophers, rendered radiant by poets such as Dante and Blake. Diminution and abridgement of the father’s image may have occurred, but the more, for all this, was the image the father’s immortality, as indeed such images are the immortality also of the most celebrated of humans, whether for good or ill, whether posterity be glad that they have lived or glad that they have died. Immortality as experience is the future we actually live until we die, not the future we hope to live in an Other-world after dying in this one.
