“Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.”

This goes to express that noting cultivated by the human mind can last forever.  No feelings can, anyway.  Trees die eventually, are even the most violent deaths are eventually lost in both history and living memory.  Though there are countless sayings that state the exact opposite, even love is not eternal.  The fact is that even if it was, human nature rarely allows any feelings, especially those of tenderness, to prevail because of primal instincts.  Those who loved were once considered weak, just as they are in the military today.  Survival of the fittest does not really come into play anymore in first world countries where we’re writing these blogs, so love and other “weaknesses” are just things that were never allowed to evolve into things that the true nature of humans let pass.  Love is a weakness, and always will be.  Love cannot always prevail or the universe would never balance out.

“Everything has to evolve or else it perishes. . . I’m almost glad this war came along. It’s like a test, isn’t it, and only the things and the people who’ve been evolving the right way survive”

It is in the nature of almost all humans, the exception being realists and pessimists, to try and see the best in situation in order to better cope with whatever hardships they face and to not go insane.  It obviously is ineffective in the case of Leper, but hey.  We can’t all be winners.  My point is that people naturally try to convince themselves that everything will be okay because we don’t want to feel weak or vulnerable by coming to terms with the facts that say everything most likely will be fine in the end.  Honestly, it almost never is.  Leper is an extreme example of what an happen when one’s nature betrays them and causes one to be blind to the truth.

“Christ, I’ve got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody”

This shows how much people honestly need someone, anyone, to be able to rely on and become close to.  The family complex is still very strongly present in the hard-wiring of the human mind.  Finny needs to believe in Gene because he is the only one around with whom Finny is close.  People can not be alone or they, naturally, become unstable and sometimes very tortured.  Like in the movie “Cast Away,” when Tom hanks’ character creates a friend out of a volleyball, humans naturally strive to have a family that they can bond with due to the ancient need for survival through strength in numbers.  Finny feels that Gene is his family and is desperate to have someone that really understands him on a deeper level because without Gene, Finny would only have his superficial followers like Brinker.