There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Good evening dear readers. Today I read The Fault in Our Stars and it made me weep. Like The Catcher in the Rye, the main character is a teenager. But her biggest problem wasn't about failing out of a preparatory school. Her problem was staying alive. She had cancer.
It's a powerful book and I put it up there with my current three favorites, Fight Club, Onion Girl, and Jesus' Son. It addresses one of the question that have been haunting me. What have I done that will be remembered? And the answer is nothing.
Right now we are each of us our own eternity, and our eternities are affecting everyone else's eternities. There may indeed come a time when none of this is remembered, but that does not change the fact that right now we do.
ReplyDeleteI remember my alphabet that my first grade teacher taught me, and it makes me able to read and to write, I remember most of the math I struggle to understand, and it helps me make purchasing decisions, and I remember the people I meet, and it helps me to smile, or cry, when I need it most.
What have you done that will be remembered? In my eternity, quite a lot.
♥
Thank you. You just made me cry again.
ReplyDeleteRandall Ahren does not cry, tears run away from his face. :D
ReplyDeleteHe does, but he sheds light instead of tears.
ReplyDelete