Mortality

Do you ever have moments in life when you feel suddenly, profoundly, and very vulnerably mortal?

Whenever I get this sensation, it's as if the world zooms out and fast-forwards, with centuries going by until all I see is a blur of nature, the remnants of our civilization subsumed by very ordinary things like rocks and trees and rivers. And whenever I will myself to see the world from that perspective, my life is a mere blip, a handful of frames in the millions of simultaneous films being played around us. When I then vision the world just bustling along after I've left, I expect to feel a nagging sense of "Hey, do you remember me? I was here."-- but I don't. I'm content just to see that the world has gone on.


Maybe Alan Weisman had this feeling too, and maybe it was strong enough for him to write A World Without Us. And maybe David Fincher, Eric Roth and F. Scott Fitzgerald each felt it in his own way when they worked on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. As I watched the film this evening, those thoughts were awoken once more. I was surprised. Strange at it may sound, this sort of thing usually comes around whenever I've been looking at really large trees.