The longer I live, the more I realize that we're all just killing time in that space between birth and death. Some of us have the satisfaction of comparatively great accomplishments in the meantime, but those will soon vanish as the people who remember them also bite the dust.
Maybe that realization is part of the reason so many people are bored by history which is the only vehicle for remembering the accomplishments and triumphs of a few lucky enough to be written about. Even then, our remembrances don't go all that far back, mainly to Greece and Rome. Beyond that, it gets hazier and hazier and finally melts into the mists of time.
Abraham Lincoln was mostly right when he said at Gettysburg that people wouldn't long remember what was done or said there, with the exception of his saying that very thing. It's one of the great truisms of history that nearly everyone is soon forgotten. Even old cemeteries get forgotten and built over. The Egyptian pyramids remain. Those who built them are long forgotten. Even those pyramids are slowly and almost imperceptively turning to dust.
So, I'm going to pry my behind out of this chair and go start preparing to launch another young couple into a few decades of mundane existence as an ordinary married couple. I hope their married life will be mostly happy and fulfilling. They, like all of us, have come. They, like all of us, will go. A century from now, only a few will remember that they existed, and then, only hazily.
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