Unnoticed

Six years ago, I wrote the following “thought for the day” in response to my own question as to whether—if a month will be lost and forgotten under the weight of the sands of time—a month ever mattered at all.

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.

My question now is whether that month, or the one just ended, still matters. I suppose so, for the world would not be the same without them. The next question would be whether the absence would have a positive or a negative impact on the world. The question, of course, is rhetorical; we would have no way of knowing the effect of a missing month. Its absence would go unnoticed.

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I have nothing more to say. The absence of words goes unnoticed. We can’t miss what was never there. People are like that. I mean people who don’t exist or who were treated like they didn’t exist.

About John Swinburn

"Love not what you are but what you may become."― Miguel de Cervantes
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4 Responses to Unnoticed

  1. You are right. Thank you! I love music that sketches stories by painting emotions. Birches does that.

  2. davidlegan says:

    He once had a Yahoo fan group named Birches. This is the song his fans were jonesing. Birches, by Bill Morrissey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xnp5E1Hm3Lw

    You will thank me.

  3. You’re right, David. We’re just passing through. I like Morrissey’s take on it; he sees the world for what it is.

  4. David Legan says:

    John, the Best Songwriter You Never Heard Of, Bill Morrissey, RIP, wrote about this subject in his song, Ice Fishing, which ends with this verse:

    There ain’t much to millwork
    Life just goes on and on
    And there ain’t much to leaving home
    ‘Til you finally cut the cord, and know you’re gone.

    And there ain’t much to ice fishing
    ‘Til you’ve missed a day or more
    And the hole you’ve cut freezes over
    And it’s like you have never been there before.

    Whether we like it or not… whether we know it or not… we are all just passin’ through.

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