After today, there will be no more November left for this year. The last vestiges of the month will depart at midnight, never to be seen again except in memory. Eventually, memories of the month will fade and finally vanish. There will be an historical record of November 2014, but even that eventually will be hidden under the weight of historical records of months and years to come. So, the question becomes this: given that November 2014 will eventually be completely forgotten, would it matter had the month never taken place?
Ten thousand years from now, if humanity still has a place in the universe, Plato and Pythagoras and Abraham Lincoln and Copernicus and Martin Luther King will be no more than footnotes to history, but they will have mattered. The world would not be the same without them. So, too, November 2014.
