Life's a Bubble

If you look up in the sky during the day, you see the Sun. That becomes the most dominant in your experience. In the night, if you look up, the stars become very dominant in your experience, but both the Sun and the stars - in fact, the Sun happens to be a star, too - look like puny little things when compared to the immense vastness of the sky. Generally, though, the sky is never in your conscious perception.

So, true existence can be likened to the vastness of the sky. The Sun, the stars, you and me, are all just small happenings, very brief happenings, really.

"In the life of a man, his time is but a moment...his sense, a dim rushlight. All that is body is as coursing waters...all that is of the soul, as dreams, and vapors."

THE world's a bubble, and the life of man
      Less than a span:
In his conception wretched, from the womb
      So to the tomb;
Curst from his cradle, and brought up to years
      With cares and fears.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust
But limns on water, or but writes in dust.

Yet whilst with sorrow here we live opprest,
      What life is best?
Courts are but only superficial schools
      To dandle fools;
The rural parts are turn'd into a den
      Of savage men;
And where's a city from foul vice so free,
But may be term'd the worst of all the three?

Our own affections still at home to please
      Is a disease;
To cross the seas to any foreign soil,
      Peril and toil;
Wars with their noise affright us; when they cease,
      We are worse in peace:
What then remains, but that we still should cry
For being born, or, being born, to die?