On Fri, 25 Dec 1998 15:04:45 -0600, you wrote:
>It's that time of year again!
>
>As the counter changes digits, it's a time to rejoice in the fact that
>humanity has gone another entire year without blowing itself up. It's a
>time to look forward to another year of technological progress and
>bitter, futile, political disputes over irrelevant matters. As we
>celebrate the random division of an arbitrary time period, it's a time
>to avoid thinking about the true twenty-billion-year chronology of the
>Universe. It's a time to try to forget the unthinkable vastness of the
>space between stars and celebrate whatever microscopic significance our
>infinitesimal lives might have.
>
>This festival of passing time reminds us of our ephemeral lives, like
>candles flaring up whitely for a moment and then diminishing to a red
>glow, sinking until even the embers fade.
Out, out, brief candle, eh?
I hear you talking...
Macbeth, right? Definitely the best of WS.
>> As the Earth completes
>another cycle around the Sun, we rejoice in the repetition of the
>ancient, futile pattern of birth and reproduction and death. Let us
>celebrate the irrevocable passing of another year of wasted time,
>another year of missed opportunities, another year of broken dreams.
>It's a time when we accumulate years of debt on our credit cards to mask
>our true selfishness. It's a time to brighten our meaningless
>existences with mercantile frenzies of acquisition. It's a time when
>carols of love and hope deny our true loneliness and despair. It's a
>time when false smiles and ostentatious declarations of friendship hide
>the dark pits of fear and hatred that lurk in our souls. It's a time
>when shouted sermons try desperately not to acknowledge that we're all
>evil to the bone. It's a time to recite insincere prayers to a bleak
>and uncaring Universe.
I NEVER pray. It's a Bad Thing :-)
Several posters on Cryonet (cryonics mailing list) have over the years pointed out that many cryonicists (I know that many Extropians are also cryos) are outsiders to society, the better to see the fallacies foibles and hypocrisies of humanity. It is, I suppose, a burden to most of us, almost in some ways a curse, to be able to see something and understand it so differently from most others.
>It's a time when our forced, nervous laughter tries to drown out the
>sound of hydrogen freezing in the interstellar void. It's a time when
>the radiant warmth of a fire or a loved one makes us forget, for a brief
>moment, the bitter three-degree-Kelvin cold of the endless night.
>
But there is also power in being able to create such a sentence, to be able to take a big picture perspective. If, that is, we place ourselves in a postion to take advantage of our differences.