Antiquity

There is a bell at the British Museum that is 100 times as old as I am. Not just 100 years old, which alone is sort of unfathomable in a practical sense (especially if you're Bigwig or Fiver), but 100 years for every 1 year of mine -- 3300 years old, shaped in the oldest bronzeworking culture of which the museum had evidence. Some time in the 13th century BC a metalworker in Southern China fashioned the large bell of hot metal, and since then it has slowly crept from deep brown to a mottled emerald green. Imagine what that man's creation has witnessed! Imagine that man himself; he lived before plastic, so he would have worn only things made from fiber, animal furs and wood -- in an age before grocery stores and doctors' offices, so he'd have been lucky to be as old as I am before the spirits took him. Long before bikes or cars, he would have seen only the land upon which he was born, perhaps several days' walking distance from it, equivalent to a person born in Boulder never seeing past the humanfarms of Westminster. Since there were no magazines or photographs when he lived, the only faces that could register as attractive or otherwise would be those with whom he actually interacted -- his sister, his mother, his cousins, his friends, his wife. With no television and no internet, the only lives he could compare to his own would be in his immediate environment: no one would have far more than him, no one far less.

What a different time that old bronze bell still breathes. How fleeting must seem the greatest, most epic of our tragedies and triumphs. A piece of metal crafted by hands like ours, by a mind like ours, in a world almost unthinkable to us -- that one man's work now rests behind glass in a museum that is visited by millions of people every month, reminding us that what we do may last. One man in an ancient village in Southwest China has set millions upon millions of others to thinking: maybe I too can make something with my time here that will outlast the millenia, change the world with my hands too in a way that will set millions upon millions to thinking...