"Oh, a very short time," replied the little man of Saturn.
"That is just as with us," said the Sirian, "we always complain how short. That must be a universal law of nature."
"Alas!" said the Saturnian, "we live for only five hundred great revolutions of the sun." (That comes to fifteen thousand years or thereabouts, counting in our way.) "You can readily see that that is dying almost at the moment we are born; our existence is a point, our duration an instant, our globe an atom. Hardly has a man begun to get a little education when death comes before he has experience. For my part I do not dare make any plans; I feel like a drop of water in an immense ocean. I am ashamed, especially in front of you, of the ridiculous figure I cut in this world."
Yes, I like the sound of something like that. Surely there's some hapless wanderer (more comic/less epic and "obvious" or really, English Professorish (blech) ) whose ostranenie matches yours, personally and artistically?
Then again Momus in Furs could be a beautiful cover...
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-28 07:14 am (UTC)http://eee.uci.edu/clients/bjbecker/ExploringtheCosmos/week5c.html
Like Gulliver, Voltaire's Micromégas is diminutive or gigantic, depending on the planet he's visiting.
"How long do you live?" said the Sirian.
"Oh, a very short time," replied the little man of Saturn.
"That is just as with us," said the Sirian, "we always complain how short. That must be a universal law of nature."
"Alas!" said the Saturnian, "we live for only five hundred great revolutions of the sun." (That comes to fifteen thousand years or thereabouts, counting in our way.) "You can readily see that that is dying almost at the moment we are born; our existence is a point, our duration an instant, our globe an atom. Hardly has a man begun to get a little education when death comes before he has experience. For my part I do not dare make any plans; I feel like a drop of water in an immense ocean. I am ashamed, especially in front of you, of the ridiculous figure I cut in this world."
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-28 02:39 pm (UTC)Then again Momus in Furs could be a beautiful cover...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-28 04:11 pm (UTC)Herr X