Does anything really stay?

It is staggering to me that anyone can find satisfaction in a life's work that leaves behind nothing. I think people want to believe in God and a life after death because their own impermanence is simply too terrifying to contemplate. Absent a belief in a spiritual life everlasting, we need other intellectual constructs that provide protective padding for our consciousness. Some people believe that to be remembered is to live forever, and that impulse may drive those who spray paint their names on overpasses as well as those who seek to rule the world, even though no good end has ever come to one who has tried. Biologists will say our purpose is to procreate, to turn out descendants and if we are lucky we will live on through them, but we know that our children will never understand us, our grandchildren will remember us as doddering fools, and generations after that give us no thought at all except to make fun of our clothes and music and blame us for ruining the planet and saddling them with our problems.

I have always believed that the only really worthwhile life is that spent in some creative and artistic pursuit. But art is a human product, and nothing human really stays. Our concept of that which has been here "always" is so meager. Shakespeare is the Immortal Bard -- whose works are only 500 years old and can barely be understood today except with careful study and extensive footnotes. Chaucer is all but lost to us. Think of the poems and epics and songs and stories that must have been told in languages that haven't been heard on earth in 10,000 years. Think of the poems and epics and songs and stories composed on Commodore 64 computers, every bit as dead to us now. "Ancient" sculpture and architecture are only a few thousand years old and crumble around us. What we produce today begins to decay before it is completed.

Even our religion exists on a temporal plane. We speak of the eternal God but does this God know anything of the forgotten eternal gods who came before and now are lost with the people who told each other the stories of how the earth and sky came to be?