"Now for the arresting part: by this measure, **the golden age of the [[Egyptian]] pharaohs—an era that strikes most of us as impossibly remote from our own—took place a scant thirty-five lifetimes ago**. Jesus was born about twenty lifetimes ago, and the [[Renaissance]] happened seven lifetimes back. A paltry five centenarian lifetimes ago, **Henry VIII** sat on the English throne. Five! "As Magee observed, the number of lives you’d need in order to span the whole of civilization, sixty, was “the number of friends I squeeze into my living room when I have a drinks party.” **From this perspective, human history hasn’t unfolded glacially but in the blink of an eye. And it follows, of course, that your own life will have been a minuscule little flicker of near-nothingness in the scheme of things**: the merest pinpoint, with two incomprehensibly vast tracts of time, the past and future of the cosmos as a whole, stretching off into the distance on either side." --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[nihilism]], [[momento-mori]], [[character]] **Source** -- [[202410130434 - B - Four Thousand Weeks]]