The Joy of Ephemera

"The best things in life are free, or so we are told. Well, I don't know about that. What I do know is, the best things in life are brief. Pleasure has an extremely short half-life. If something marvelous goes on for too long, we start to feel bored and uncomfortable. 'When a rainbow has lasted as long as a quarter of an hour we stop looking at it,' Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote. Rainbows are miraculous things but their fame, like our own, lasts about fifteen minutes. That's no bad thing, I think. Our most intense sensations, whether sensual, intellectual or spiritual- are always fleeting. In fact, they are all the more intense for being so short. It's like being in an earthquake. The Earth moves for only a few seconds but the experience leaves us permanently rattled." - James Geary www.jamesgeary.com