Lewis thus illuminates my central distinction between living on (prolonging a temporal life) and being eternal (absorbed in a timeless existence).

The condition of our freedom, then, is that we understand ourselves as finite. Only in light of the apprehension that we will die—that our lifetime is indefinite but finite—can we ask ourselves what we ought to do with our lives and put ourselves at stake in our activities.

Under capitalism, all questions of what we need, what we want, and what is durable, must be subordinated to the question of what is profitable.

The third trait of spiritual freedom is the ability to ask myself what to do with my time.

salvation is achieved by letting go of your passions and seeing yourself as part of what he calls God or Nature. The two terms are interchangeable for Spinoza, since both designate the eternal, immanent substance of everything that exists,

Caring about someone or something requires that we believe in its value, but it also requires that we believe that what is valued can cease to be.

The second trait of spiritual freedom is the ability of a person to bear a negative self-relation.

you and your beloved did not believe that your lives were finite, neither one of you could take your lives to be at stake and there would be no urgency to do anything with your time. You could never care for yourselves, for one another, or for the commitment that you share, since you would have no sense of fragility. By the same token, you could

The deepest reason capitalism is a contradictory social form is that it treats the negative measure of value as though it were the positive measure of value and thereby treats the means of economic life as though they were the end of economic life.