system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What does Wittgenstein mean by this quote?

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
gpt
It's initially a bit unclear what the two sentences have to do with each other. It helps to read them in the surrounding context of *TLP*. They are the first two sentences of 6.4311.

> 6.431 So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.


> 6.4311 *Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.*
Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.


Death isn't the sort of thing we can experience, just like we can't see the limits of our visual field. We might relate this to the central theme of the *Tractatus*, that the limits of language/the limits of the expression of thought can't be expressed.

If eternity means timelessness, and eternal life is living in the present, then living in the present is a sort of timelessness. Connecting this with the first sentence of your quote, living to experience death is a way of not living in the present. 

I don't think the second sentence is trying to explain the relation in the first sentence between life and death. He's instead making a point about the metaphysical and theological conception of life after death. (About why "this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended." 6.4312) The eternal life that some philosophers attempted to prove by arguing for the immortality of the soul (and thereby the world) after death is fundamentally misguided. Eternal life doesn't consist in the soul existing past death; it consists in living in the present.

We are thus misguided when we think that death is an event in the world, or that "the world alters" (6.431) at death. The world comes to an end at death. If recognizing this point is connected the possibility of eternal life, one achievable by living in the present, then this brings out why it's so important to understand his point in 6.431 that the world comes to an end at death (as well as this point's connection to 6.43 and his larger discussion of the "happy man").