> Nah, the fact that life is ephemeral could paradoxically make it seem
> more precious, more beatiful. I remember, I think it was in Beowulf
> (ca 800 AD), that life is compared to a swallow that flies into a
> dining hall where everyone is eating and making merry...before flying
> out again, into the darkness. This was definitely pre-modernity...and
> life looked like a party between darkness and darkness.
Close, both in the alphabet and chronologically. Not Beowolf, but the Venerable Bede:
"The present life of men on earth, O king, as compared with the whole length of time which is knowable to us, seems to be to be like this: as if, when you are sitting at dinner with your chiefs and ministers in wintertime, ... one of the sparrows from outside flew very quickly through the hall; as if it came in one door and soon went out through another. In that actual time it is indoors it is not touched by the winter's storm; but yet the tiny period of calm is over in a moment, and having come out of the winter it soon returns to the winter and slips out of your sight. Man's life appears to be more or less like this; and of what may follow it, or what preceded it, we are absolutely ignorant."
Ecclesiastical history (731 C.E.), 2, 13
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax