“Stepping up onto your own shoulders”
The Reincarnationist Papers“Stepping up onto your own shoulders” is the speaker’s image for how remembered lives can accumulate into greater perspective. In his account, each return raises a person a little higher, extending both what they can see ahead and what they can look back upon.
Context
The image emerges in a conversation about whether belief in reincarnation could remove the terror of death. The other speaker recalls Poppy’s assurance that once a person comes back, they always will, while admitting that the claim has not yet become a matter of faith. In response, the man leaning across the table says that he has returned sixteen times, for seventeen lives in all, and remembers every one in minute detail.
Meaning of the Metaphor
The phrase makes recurrence cumulative rather than merely repetitive. A new life is not presented as a simple reset: the speaker describes each one as adding height, so that the person can see farther along the horizon and farther back through time. The image of standing on one’s own shoulders turns memory into a foundation for perspective, linking the accumulated past to an expanded view of what lies ahead.
Significance
The metaphor gives the speaker’s conviction a concrete shape. His claim to remember seventeen lives supports his confidence that death is followed by return; the image then expresses what he believes those returns make possible. Yet the exchange preserves a distinction between his certainty and the other speaker’s tentative reasoning: the latter can accept the logic without claiming faith. The raised glass and the toast to faith close the conversation on that unresolved difference.
