| Maybe One Day I'll Get My Act TogetherBut it's not likely. Pg. 25, The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall: "Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there's not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago. Everything is changing. (...) I noticed how the shadow of a telegraph pole would inch between the gardens of two houses across the street- from 152 to the garden of 150- over the course of several hours, from lunchtime into evening. After watching this a few times I did the maths: the shadow movement from one garden to the next meant that both houses, the telegraph pole, the street, all of us, had traveled one thousand, one hundred and sixty miles around the earth with the turning of the planet. We'd also traveled about seventy-six thousand miles through space around the sun in the same period and much much further as part of the wider spiralling of the galaxy. And nobody noticed a thing. There is no stillness, only change. Yesterday's here is not today's here. Yesterday's here is somewhere in Russia, in a wilderness in Canada, a deep blue nowhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It's behind the sun, it's in deep space, hundreds of thousands, millions of miles left behind. We can never wake up in the same places we went to sleep in. Our place in the universe, the universe itself, all changes faster and faster by the second. Every one of us standing on this planet, we're all moving forwards and we're never ever coming back. The truth is, stillness is an idea, a dream. It's the thought of friendly, welcoming lights still shining in all the places we've been forced to abandon." I don't think anyone could have put it better. Read the book. |
