The everlasting tree of existence

The everlasting tree of existence names a transformed sense of time: the past is not a dead gulf behind the present but an enduring reality, of which the present is only the growing surface. For the Fifth Men, access to past minds turned this image into lived experience, making history at once an inheritance to cherish and a burden that could not be put away.

The Image and Its Temporal Claim

Before their discovery, the Fifth Men could understand intellectually that the past was vast and rich, but historical knowledge remained schematic. Their new access let them encounter earlier events through intimate acquaintance. What had seemed remote and ghostly became present to experience, and the moving instant of the present ceased to appear as the only real moment. In the resulting image, the past is the enduring tree; the present is its growing surface, and the future remains unknown.

The metaphor therefore reverses the ordinary hierarchy of time. The present does not stand alone as reality while the past recedes into nonexistence. Rather, the past endures, while the present is a thin, continually becoming boundary of that larger existence. The Fifth Men’s experience does not make the future equally accessible: it still seems void. The tree gathers what has happened into lasting reality without resolving what is yet to come.

From Historical Knowledge to Experience

The change followed the Fifth Men’s discovery that their brains could make contact with past events beyond ordinary temporal memory. What such an explorer could understand was limited by the capacity of the particular brain; moreover, the encounter itself might occupy no time in natural life, but assimilating it into ordinary memory required time during the trance. The past could be entered, but the experience still had to be worked into a living mind.

This access altered the Fifth Men’s sense of historical scale. Previously, they had been like people who read about distant places without travelling; now they could experience the continents of human time. Remote events could enter and shape a person as recent events did through memory. The tree is thus more than a figure for the persistence of records: its past becomes part of the present consciousness of those who encounter it.

Inheritance, Ruin, and Reinterpretation

The book’s histories show why the metaphor matters across civilizations. After the First World State fell, the First Men did not simply recover their former order. An epidemic of insanity and diminished intelligence hindered the immediate response; longer-lasting pressures, including the loss of prolonged youth, compounded the decline. Only a tenth of the population survived the disaster, and later generations lived amid ruins, with much scientific knowledge lost. The past nevertheless remained active in distorted forms: a Swastika once associated with an aeroplane’s destruction and the rebels’ overthrow of the State was reinterpreted by later people as the sign of a divine ancestor and a vanished golden age.

In Patagonia, recovery of durable metal plates in the basement of a shattered pylon in China gave archaeologists access to an earlier civilization’s writings. Deciphering them disclosed not merely lost knowledge but the scale of a prior rise and ruin, overturning the Patagonians’ belief that they were pioneers of the mind. Their assessment depended on testing the inherited record: they distinguished the earlier civilization’s sound achievements from its degeneration. The discovery divided them between those who rejected the findings and those who accepted the challenge of using them, and the conflict that followed unified the world under a new culture.

The Second Men encountered another kind of remnant when engineers found a great stone library in Siberia while preparing to sink a shaft for subterranean energy. Its broken, weathered tablets were reconstructed with help from a pictorial dictionary. The Second Men valued them chiefly as historical evidence of how the earlier species had thought, rather than as a source of scientific or philosophical truth. Across these recoveries, the past persists, but its meaning depends on the minds that inherit and interpret it.

Joy, Suffering, and the Work of Memory

For the Fifth Men, this persistence brought deep joy: the past could be known and loved with a vividness unavailable to detached historical study. But it also meant that past pain, misery, and degradation had not disappeared. Explorers who encountered regions of enduring agony returned distraught; appeals to the enduring joy found elsewhere did not persuade everyone that suffering was thereby compensated. The tree’s permanence makes its beauty inseparable from its distressing contents.

The later account gives this engagement an ethical form. The Last Men undertake to know and love every past mind they can enter, including those who were least admired, treating such understanding as a filial act that adds something beautiful to the cosmos. They also turn to the past for strength: although reconciled to their fate, they must undertake the unwelcome work of producing and scattering artificial human seeds among the stars. Encountering the past’s heroic but often forlorn struggles renews their loyalty to life. The tree is therefore not only a picture of what endures; it connects present action to the lives already lived and helps sustain a struggle whose outcome remains uncertain.