One must console oneself with the thought that time has a sieve through which most of these important things run into the ocean of oblivion and what remains after this selection is often still trite and bad.
SIREN, n. One of several musical prodigies famous for a vain attempt to dissuade Odysseus from a life on the ocean wave. Figuratively, any lady of splendid promise, dissembled purpose and disappointing performance.
In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
My skin prickled and I looked back at the ocean. None of us ask for the things we inherit; they are thrust upon us, willy-nilly. Like The Marine, I suddenly understood. Mom and I weren't trespassing. This house was ours. This view was ours. And that seemed as absurd and unreal as the stories Sailor Hat had spun for me on the ferry.
What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained - though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.
Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore, Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable sea?
Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth... then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away.
Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore.
On life's vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but passion is the gale; Nor God alone in the still calm we find, He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind.
This Maya is everywhere. It is terrible. Yet we have to work through it. The man who says that he will work when the world has become all good and then he will enjoy bliss is as likely to succeed as the man who sits beside the Ganga and says, "I will ford the river when all the water has run into the ocean."