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Maybe it__ not metaphysics. Maybe it__ existential. I__ talking about the individual US citizen__ deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we__e lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it__ all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it__ not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than __ie,_ __ass away,_ the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday__ __nd not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we__e remembered, these__l last what__ hundred years? two hundred?__nd they__l crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I__ cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we__e all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that__ why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.