In April, in a small town on a small island in a small string of islands trailing down from the main part of Japan, the world’s then-oldest person died. Nabi Tajima was 117 years old—the last surviving human being born in the 19th century.
Maybe the year 1900 sounds far away, to you. It comes closer. My father was born in 1940. Right now, I am 47 years old. Everyone who was 47 years old when my father was born is now dead. All of them. That entire group of middle-aged people, who made up the adult world when my father was a child, is gone.
Snippets
Social, cultural or political change does not work in predictable ways or on predictable schedules.
The month before the Berlin Wall fell, almost no one anticipated that the Soviet bloc was going to disintegrate all of a sudden.
- Rebecca Solnit, Hope is an Embrace of the Unknown
To Nagel, we humans always find ourselves clashing between these two things: (1) The inevitable seriousness in which we view our lives, and
(2) The ability to view that seriousness as being silly and insignificant.
What makes the whole thing so absurd is that even after we notice the meaninglessness of things, it doesn’t make them any less significant to us.
- Lawrence Yeo, The Meaning of Life Is Absurd
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