Time & Perspective Quote by George Wald

Immortality is framed here not as a mystical prize but as a stubborn human project, old as record-keeping itself. George Wald, a scientist who spent his life parsing how living systems work, compresses a whole anthropology into one clean sentence: the moment we started making “history,” we started trying to outrun it. The phrasing is slyly deflationary. “Since we have had a history” makes immortality sound less like a transcendent calling than a predictable side effect of self-awareness, the psychological tax we pay for remembering yesterday and imagining tomorrow.

Wald’s intent reads as diagnostic rather than devotional. He isn’t praising the quest; he’s noting its persistence. “Men have pursued” suggests a repeated pattern of effort and failure, a chase that keeps resetting with each generation. The “ideal” matters, too: immortality is presented as an abstraction that organizes behavior - religion, legacy-building, monuments, bloodlines, scientific breakthroughs - even when the literal goal is impossible. In Wald’s register, immortality is a cultural technology: a way to soften the brutality of biological limits by laundering fear into meaning.

The context of a 20th-century scientist is crucial. Wald lived through eras when science both demoted humanity (Darwin, Freud’s unconscious) and offered new salvation narratives (medicine, space, nuclear power). His line quietly punctures the modern faith that progress will finally deliver what myth promised. History doesn’t cure the desire for permanence; it manufactures it, because to know you are in a story is to crave a sequel with your name still in it.