William Shakespeare - I cleaned this picture up from Listal.
William Shakespeare - Engraving by Martin Droeshout, from 1st folio, London 1632
Sometimes we can do no better than to turn to William Shakespeare when a doleful moment arises. He wrote quite a bit and profoundly too about vital issues and what we should do about them. Take for example his sonnet LXIV:
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age
When sometime lofty towers I see down-raz’d,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded, to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate —
That Time will come and take my love away.This thought is as a death which cannot choose
But weep to have, that which it fears to lose.
William has been dead for some four centuries since writing that sonnet, and thus everything which he held dear is beyond his living conscious perception. And yet, what he wrote is as true today as it was when he was looking at the ocean shores being worn away only to be rebuilt elsewhere. He, of course, knew nothing of the geological processes which rebuilt the mountains which were eventually worn away by the pounding sea, but clearly he understood the transient quality of all the things which he held dear. Even the soil upon which he stood.
He knew the dimensions and powers of the world were very big and that eternal forces would ultimately conquer everything we humans value; but he hadn’t the faintest conception of how very much bigger the universe actually would be proven to be. We now know how even tinier humanity’s impact on those ultimate things can ever be. Let’s observe — our life’s maximum is a hundred years, but the Universe is already 13.8 billion years old. That is 13,800,000,000 to 100 or 13 million times longer than our maximum life expectancy. And, our space traveled in that 100 years under our own walking power, at ten miles per day, would be only 365,000 miles. That is less than 2 seconds of travel of that 13.8 billion light years distance of space and in one dimension only. We are very, very tiny in comparison to the universe and yet our relationship to the vastly greater realm than William’s is identical to his. Thus his thoughts are as accurate and applicable today as they were when he wrote them.
All we value will soon be gone thus we must love it while we’re still here.
138 million
Rod is right. I was rounding numbers and slipped a decimal point which is more than rounding it’s an error.