Enrico Fermi, the renowned physicist exclaimed "Where is everybody?" He was referring to the fact that no life has been detected in the Universe after hundreds of years and thousands of people searching. On this planet many people have an epiphany when they notice that, like comets, events, eras, people, friends, money, movie legends, presidents, athletes on the radar screen, dogs, bank robbers, seasons, gorgeous women, time itself, is in a constant mode of things and people drifting over the horizon, or vanish like a large flash of light, an arcane event. To many this is disconcerting, they weep over the end of fall or miss an old friend. To some like George Carlin, the comedian, things passing is great and a giant joke, like when an annoying, crazy uncle leaves. To others like Joey who cried out in the western movie Shane, across a mountain valley, to Allen Ladd as he rode away for good on his horse, "Shane, come back, come back Shane." That had to be one of the saddest moments in the boys life, and a very sad and touching scene in western movie history. The scene gripped the audience to the core of emotion, even when watched to this day, years later; the tears of a young boy in the West and the final farewell of a cowboy he loved. If you believe like the American Indians, who thought that nature and life was a circle, and all things and people return, there remains hope, and even in passing you go to the Happy Hunting Grounds. In New Orleans when a jazz musician passes, they shouted at his musical, loud funeral, "He left town." The past 4 years millions of people who sparkled in their communities like a comet, have left town to greener pastures, on a new, long, dusty trail. The American Dream itself may have vanished. It has been a major exodus especially from ski towns that saw the end of their Gold Rush years. Does John Steinbecks "Grapes of Wrath" come to mind? "...all the bells that ever rang still ringing in the long dying rays of light." William Faulkner. The Khazars, a warrior tribe in the Caucasus, said their prayers by weeping. Their sadness over a life that vanishes is expressed in prayer. Then, suddenly they vanished, as a tribe, wiped out by other warrior tribal nations, with almost no archeological sign of their existence, by the Black Sea. "Ships that pass in the night, and speak to each other in passing, only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; so on the ocean of life we pass and speak, then darkness again and a silence." Longfellow "Hast thou never seen the comet's flaming flight? The illustrious stranger passing, terror sheds on gazing nations from his fiery train of length enormous ; takes his ample round through depths of ether; coasts unnumbered worlds of more than solar glory; doubles wide, Heavens mighty cape; and then revisits earth from the long travel of a thousand years." Edward Young "Night Thoughts"
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