When a thing continues, there is the thought of motion and change. A thing in time is as it has been and as it has not been. Thought of as still being as it was, it is continuing.
Essential in the feeling of “I” is continuity. Every moment of a person’s life has had the I. Change has been, things have happened, but the I has persisted. That is how we come to feel we are I. More forces are in the persistence of the self felt as I than in any other thing. The power making for persistence of the I is richer than in any other instance of reality.
The I continues and wishes to do so. Even when we think of dying, we can’t give up the notion of the I as continuing. We may say toughly, hard-mindedly, rationalistically, and so on, that we do give up the notion of the I; but most deeply, we don’t. We just can’t. We can see the world as discontinuing for us sooner and perhaps more easily than we can think of our I discontinuing as such.
The self is, then, the principal example of continuity. It is the leading insister on being as one was; on going on.
Continuing is an aspect of being, just so. As soon as we say that a thing is, and we say that it is a moment later, we think of it as continuing. Has been and is meet, always, in continuing.
Various kinds of things can be seen as continuing.
- Henry Green continues to be Henry Green. —Here a person as thing, even though he has been drunk, divorced his wife, lost money, got pneumonia, worried, yearned—is, legally, and to himself, still Henry Green. And as I have intimated, since the very notion of a world and death and being has come through himself, if not from himself, Henry Green or Henry Greenness, he can’t see himself as other than eternal. In death, all else will discontinue for him; and if it doesn’t, he will continue, too.
- Wood continues to be wood. —Whatever wood was at any time, in paleolithic times or in Homeric times, or in medieval times, wood is wood. That a thing is, once it definitely is, continues. All is is also being, going on. While is is that, it continues; if it doesn’t, is becomes isn’t.
- Wood is not water. —A negative also continues. What a thing has not been continues not to be, unless it changes to is or has been. That 3 is not 7 continues.
So far, I have dealt with nouns. A thing continues to be what it is while it is that thing. Continuing likewise has to do with the how of nouns.
- Leaves continue to be green. —Leaves not only are leaves and continue to be leaves, but also have persistent forms. One of these forms of leaves is in the adjective green. It may also be said that leaves continue to be brown and red; but this does not destroy the fact that leaves continue to be green.
- The greenness of leaves continues. —All continuity can be put in the form of a noun idea. This statement is a changing of the previous one so that the adjective of leaves, the how of leaves, is changed into a noun thing.
Motion also continues. When motion is seen as continuing, it is given a rest quality. When this is done in art, beauty occurs.
- Rivers continue to flow. —Rivers continue to be rivers; but the flowingness of rivers also continues. Fields continue to be, and growth on fields continues to be. A warehouse persists; and flying persists.
Forms of motion also persist.
- Rivers continue to flow steadily. —What continues here is the adverbial aspect of flow. I could also say, waterfalls continue to fall dashingly, foamingly. The continuing is a continuing of dashingness and foamingness.
Continuing may be also of things in themselves discontinuing.
- John continues to be erratic. —Uncertainty is here dealt with as certain. —The future continues to be unpredictable. The “unsteady” is again dealt with as steady.
When we look at ourselves, we see a great going on. The I that we have now is an unbroken succession of I states. There is a flow to the I. We can, if we wish, make breaks in that I. We can see ourselves as different at the time we went to school from the time we didn’t; at the time we lived in San Francisco from the time we lived in New York; at the time we knew a person from the time we didn’t; yet there is the flow of I moments all the while. Certainly the I can be seen as discontinuous; however, once we say “I” of everything we did and do, we are asserting continuity.
The other great continuing is existence itself. There was a great Going-on, that, as it went on, changed into our going-on. A tradition is unbroken. If all that went before went to make us, then we also have relation to all that will go on.
What was, is; for being itself is continuous. There is an indefinite possibility of our being thought of, which means a continuance of our affecting people. Is it we who will affect people? And can something affect people without that something existing?
One question has to be asked. If the great Continuing or Going-on saw fit to come to us once, why not twice? It can be said this has never happened; but the world can be said to be beginning just as much now as at any other time. It is hardly scientific to put limitations on existence.
This in itself is no proof of just how continuous (with interruptions) the I may be. Still, it should be considered why, if in infinite time a certain combination of reality called a specific I came to be once, this infinite reality, with unlimited opportunity, couldn’t do the same thing again,—with some changes if need be.
The idea of just going on is distasteful to mind. Just going on or continuing is not dramatic enough. A possibility of stopping is desired. Drama lies in the continuing of something with discontinuing possible. —So immortality from one point of view is undramatic and undesirable. The range of happenings should be unrestricted, and so not being or “dying” has its points.
But stoppage by itself is also undramatic. The stopping of the thing must somehow carry over or continue. When a play ends, if it is a great play, it continues in our minds. There is a suggestion of event.
Now in human beings there is a desire to be and not to be. A self wishes these three things: to annul what it is; to be what it is; to be more than what it is. In true ecstasy, this is done. Continuing is also stoppage, also being more, also completion, in ecstasy.
In suicide, there is a deeply, coyly private I which is seen as persisting when a more outside I or lesser I is done away with. The I is, as such, a persistence mechanism. It is a perpetual persistence mechanism. In death we really see our I as somewhere. The suicide sees the I as purified, not as having been put out of existence.
And so we come to the last continuing: the continuing to remain. There is a continuing to alter, destroy, annul; and there is a continuing to remain. Remain is a word containing what is and isn’t. A thing remains empty; and a thing can continue to remain empty.
The word continue, joined here with remain and empty, gives assertiveness to nothingness. If the self was, it continues to remain; for in the idea of self is persistence, even in a somewhat funny and impolite way. The self can continue being with various kinds of unawareness. The self, in a sense, is deeper than the I. The self is all that the I knows, not just what the I can talk about.
Self can, quite soberly, be seen as having been before a person was born. Possibility continues even after the self has become actual. The self becomes I, and then the I tries to be the whole self. It cannot be shown that existence discontinues trying to be an I, or that an I discontinues trying to be entirely what it is; or a self.
The idea of continuity is then charmingly, thrillingly indispensable. How continuity may operate is difficult to see, but the idea of it is still good and shapely. All of these nice adjectives can, surely, be used of change, too. That continuity and change can both be beautiful shows the dazzlingly satisfying scope of the universe.