No Visible End to Your Troubles

Non-existence returns no value. How is one to talk about non-existence without bringing it into existence while doing so? For something not to exist it must not have any qualities. And it is impossible to describe or,, indeed, understand anything without giving expression to its qualities. Intellectually is therefore impossible to treat non-existence in any other way than as an existence with a prefix, that is, treat all of it as some form of anti-existence but existence nonetheless. The most accurate description of non-existence would be to say that non-existence does not exists. Thus one ends up with existence only.We are coerced to bring into existence whatever we try to imagine.
Non-existence cannot have experience of its own non-existence.
Existence endowed with self-consciousness is a biography. A self conscious existence such as human life appears as an autobiography of a decidedly uncertain duration (uncertain duration belongs, by and large, to a cultural side of the story). While process of dying may be conscious, being dead cannot be so by that ancient well-known definition (if you are experiencing anything then you are obviously conscious and alive).
If then non-existence does not exist, and there is only existence it follows from this a form of immortality where conscious life is like a never ending series of autobiographies attached seamlessly one to the next, end to beginning, where seamlessness comes by virtue of annihilation of life's memories on the death side and absence of knowledge on the new-life side. What falls in between (for us unspeakable, unimaginable and above all unexperiencable) in non-existence - it which isn't -returning no value since it cannot consciously experience itself. This, it seems, is how subjectivity (a human being if you prefer) should perceive itself; a never-ending experience. Thus one arrives at a peculiar form of secular immortality, the immortality of subjectivity as a direct result of the impossibility to experience the state of non-existence.
I have been constructed by the rules of the Universe - whatever those rules and the universe may be. The scientific formulations of those rules change nothing and are irrelevant to subjectivity since subjectivity is a biography and functions happily with any set of cultural and scientific beliefs.
A biography has one endearing and reassuring characteristic; no matter who you are you will always be yourself simply because you can only experience your own biography.

Nil Penna Sed Usus

"Nil Penna Sed Usus" is a motto on my ring. Latin ambiguity makes it hard to decide on original intention: "Not the wing but its use" as well as "Not the pen but its use". I have not been able to trace the origin of my ring. Because it is an old ring and has been re-sized many times all the marks normally left by the jeweler are no longer visible. What institution would have used such a motto, and who was the intended recipient of such a ring if it was a prize? A pupil of the English Public School perhaps? I wish I knew where it had come from before October 2001 when I noticed it in the window of antique jewelry shop on the top floor of Queen Victoria Building.
It is a gold seal ring. A scroll with words "Nil Penna Sed Usus" runs along bottom edge of the face; in the centre there is a shield with three feathers (quills) placed diagonally. Above the shield there is an armored head in a circle of laurels. The ring's band is in the form of two intertwined serpents.