Yesterday I returned to a place that may one day be immortalised by the radioscript Report from a Swedish Village. The village is Kungsholmen and my old haunt was the Chinese Pavilion built out over the water on Mälarstrand. It was here that I wrote the afterword of The Return of the Ancient Mariner 15-years ago in the form of an introduction to the book by my son Nicholas John…after William Shepherd had disappeared while on a trip to Colombia. Here is yesterday’s journal entry…my seventh from Sweden this summer…written at Mälarstrand Konditori.

I have almost come to terms intellectually with the idea that I am 60 and entering the final third or quarter of my life on earth. Life is the damndest thing…you come from nothing, you're going back to nothing, what have you lost? Nothing. I can get my head round the Priestley Metaphysical Option…the individual is everything in life and nothing beyond life. The transfer of life through the species is the meaning of life…a variation on the Selfish Gene approach. Nonetheless I have not yet given up on the individual and his Is That All There Is question.

The little individual has two roads to immortality…passing on himself or passing on his acts…as in Acts of the Apostles…thinking not only of art, books and memes but also of attitudes, values and ways of going about things. This thought dovetails with Buckminster Fuller’s idea that the universe somehow manages to give more individual brownie points for work that is done for all people and all time than…at the other extreme…for instant gratification of the little individual’s own needs…with a sliding scale in between. However the arithmetic is crucial.

To produce something for everyone and everytime…Lao Tzu’s Tao-Te and Albert Einstein’s e=mc2 get close…is so infinitesimally improbable for the little individual that the expectation of doing so is a kind of madness. You can improve the odds during the course of a lifetime. But it is still wildly improbable. However the odds start to improve when instead of everyone everywhere and everytime you go for one family half a dozen generations hence. With luck the Fuller curve may even be non-linear with a Cosmic Pareto’s Principle that gives you 80% of the brownie points for breaking 20% of the bonds of Kierkegaard’s Paradox…living in time with society and in eternity with yourself.

When I dwelt upon such weighty matters a few years ago for my Last Will and Testament I stipulated that my journals...forty one and rising…should remain in the family for at least 200 years. I gave this a little more thought yesterday on Mälarstrand and decided to stick with it. Here is the other…preceding…part of yesterday’s entry.

Another of my old Stockholm haunts turns out to be quite unchanged. There is something a little eerie about returning to a place two decades later and finding that everything looks and feels the same…while knowing that all the people are either new or have shed their complete collection of trillions of cells six or seven times during those twenty years. It is the same uneasiness I get with the idea of a Neutron Bomb that destroys people leaving property unscathed.

Our governing structures give me similar feelings. They remain unchanged while the actors are swapped around, die off or get replaced. Similar thoughts arose riding the Orient Express to Rådhuset and listening to two Kenyan couples chatting and laughing in Swahili and English across from me. How incredible were the odds against just those particular individuals being there at all. However there is another side to the coin which is just as spooky.

Over a longer time span…take 200 years as I was watching the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice last night that Helena sent in my 60th Birthday Package...almost the whole of the physical infrastructure is completely replaced. People are the same as they have always been…but only in their bodies; not on their bodies or in their heads.

Taken together these Rates of Renewal represents a delicate mechanism that we meddle with at our peril. The Koyaanisqatsi that the Hopi speak of has been thrown out of balance not by Modern Man but by the structures constructed to adjust these rates. One of these is the Rule of Five unleashed by the Mechanism of Central Banking. Life Rates are where it is at...metaphysically. And Political Economy is not good with Time...theoretically.