The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

particularly excites you for whatever reason. Try to re-create the spirit
of those times, to get inside the subjective experience of the actors you
are reading about, using your active imagination. See the world
through their eyes. Make use of the excellent books written in the last
hundred years to help you gain a feel for daily life in particular periods
(for example, Everyday Life in Ancient Rome by Lionel Casson or The
Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga). In the literature of the
time you can detect the prevailing spirit. The novels of F. Scott
Fitzgerald will give you a much livelier connection to the Jazz Age than
any scholarly book on the subject. Drop any tendencies to judge or
moralize. People were experiencing their present moment within a
context that made sense to them. You want to understand that from
the inside out.
In this way you will feel differently about yourself. Your concept of
time will expand and you will realize that if the past lives on in you,
what you are doing today, the world you live in, will live on and affect
the future, connecting you to the larger human spirit that moves
through us all. You in this moment are a part of that unbroken chain.
And this can be an intoxicating experience, a strange intimation of
immortality.
The future:
We can understand our effect on the future most clearly
in our relationship to our children, or to those young people we
influence in some way as teachers or mentors. This influence will last
years after we are gone. But our work, what we create and contribute to
society, can exert even greater power and can become part of a
conscious strategy to communicate with those of the future and
influence them. Thinking in this way can actually alter what we say or
what we do.

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Certainly Leonardo da Vinci followed such a strategy. He
continually tried to envision what the future might be like, to live in it
through his imagination. We can see the evidence of this in his
drawings of possible inventions that might exist in the future, some of
which, like flying machines, he actually attempted to create. He also
thought deeply about the values people might hold in the future that
did not yet exist in the times that he lived through. For instance, he felt
a deep affinity for animals and saw them as possessing souls, a belief
that was virtually unheard of at the time. This impelled him to become
a vegetarian and to go around freeing caged birds in the marketplace.
He saw all nature as one, including humans, and he imagined a future
in which that belief would be shared.
The great feminist, philosopher, and novelist Mary Wollstonecraft
(1759–1797) believed that we humans can actually create the future by
how we imagine it in the present. For her, in her short life, much of
this came in her imagining a future in which the rights of women and,
most important, their reasoning powers were given equal weight to
men. Her thinking in these terms in fact did have a profound influence
on the future.
Perhaps one of the most uncanny examples of this is Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), a scientist, novelist, and
philosopher. He aspired to a kind of universal knowledge, similar to
Leonardo’s, in which he tried to master all forms of human
intelligence, steep himself in all periods of history, and through this be
able to not only see the future but commune with its inhabitants. He
was able to anticipate a theory of evolution decades before Darwin. He
foresaw many of the great political trends of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, including the eventual unification of Europe after
World War II. He imagined many of the advances of technology and
the effects these would have on our spirit. He was someone who
actively attempted to live outside his time, and his prophetic powers
were legendary among his friends.
Finally, sometimes we may feel like we are born into the wrong
period in history, out of harmony with the times. And yet we are locked
into this moment and must live through it. If such is the case, this
strategy of immortality can bring us some relief. We are aware of the
cycles of history and how the pendulum will swing and the times will
change, perhaps after we are gone. In this way, we can look to the
future and feel some connection to those who are living well beyond

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this terrible moment. We can reach out to them, make them part of our
audience. Some day they will read about us or read our words, and the
connection will go in both directions, indicating this supreme human
ability to surmount one’s time and the finality of death itself.
A man’s shortcomings are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness
belong to himself.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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