Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1393

1393. But if the living being, compared with this creation, dies like a "mayfly", indeed, we are bound to say here a "microscopic mayfly", and can thus never in an absolutely concrete or practical sense experience the whole, since it can experience only the little microscopic spot in the whole that constitutes its present life and conduct, then there is not a single being to see the result of this enormous, millions-of-years-long, global creation. The whole of this enormous process – the mineral, the vegetable and the animal epochs of evolution lasting millions of years each – has existed only in order to create a result that no living being could experience or take in because they must die, they must become "corpses", they must rot in their graves, they must become dust, and they must dissolve into "nothingness". Is this not a strange world picture, a tragic view of life? The great work of art endures, but the living life that has the ability to see it is dissolved and becomes "nothing", and will therefore never have the opportunity to see it. It cannot therefore have been intended for the living life, the living beings. They are, as will be remembered, "microscopic ephemeral beings" whose life is just as uncertain and flickering as a single reflection of the sun on the crests of the ocean waves.