I am sitting here in my own little corner of the Pantheon porch, which is a very small corner indeed when you consider how many other corners of similar size this universe contains. And while I am sitting, I am confronting my own smallness. It is not the kind of smallness that is measured in inches and meters, although even standing on the tip of my toes and reaching my hands as far as possible, I may as well reach for the stars as for this ancient roof, for I am small in that sense as well. But even though this space is tall and wide and deep, its perimeter is not the sum of its greatness. Rather, in addition to being very tall and very wide and very deep, it is long, long, long. This kind of length is measured in minutes and millennia and is enough to put me face-to-face with my own minuscule-ity.
Meanwhile,
a little corner of humanity has begun huddling under the porch to take cover
from an approaching rain storm. Although
it seems like a torrent of people from where I'm sitting, I must remind myself that this corner is a
very small corner indeed when I consider how many other corners of similar size
this Earth contains and has contained. It
makes me wonder about all the great men and women who have passed under this
roof. And, even more, I wonder about all the other men and women, who were
perhaps not actually less great but only less memorable to the slippery annals
of our histories. For it is not only the
so-called “greats” that have made us, but equally, or perhaps even more so, those
folks in whom we would recognize ourselves if we were able to look through time the same way we look in mirrors. These
people were left out of writing the stories, but it was, nonetheless, their
lives and loves and triumphs and forgotten struggles that bound the book. Just as individual letters fill and give meaning to a page, their lives filled and gave meaning to the
Earth. Yet, just as we would be hard-pressed to identify the
individual importance of any single, isolated letter, we would be hard-pressed to describe even one of their faces. Even so, they have shaped our world and made, literally made us.
And in all of this conglomeration of humanity over space and time, where does that leave me and my little corner? Where does it leave my companions who have, at least for now, managed to escape the rain? I imagine we will all stick around for a while and leave with brighter skies. After all, this rain will not last forever. These long columns, which have seen their fair share of rain storms, could surely tell us that. Nor will we last forever, these columns could also tell us that.
