I was at work this past night reading Plato, and, about halfway through the "Gorgias," something occurred to me. Socrates was executed in 399 B.C. - about twenty-four hundred years ago. I am twenty-one years old, which means that the death of Socrates took place only a small portion more than one hundred of my lifetimes ago. That means that everything that has happened since then, the entire history of philosophy, the rise of Christianity (and, later, Islam), the rise and fall of Rome (to say nothing of several lesser empires), the Rennaisance, the age of exploration, the enlightenment, and countless other huge, epochal events all fall within one hundred spans equal to my current history. Furthermore, I am projected to live to be eighty years old (that's approximately the average lifespan for a modern male, I believe). That means that all of that - the entire history of the modern world - fits into a scant THIRTY of my lifespans.

This all seems incredible to me. As one who has always counted the passage of time as interminable, I am now struck with the brevity of it all. To think that if I could live my life only thirty times, I would find myself as far removed from my date of birth as I now am from the age of Socrates and Plato, and, even more, that if I could live backwards thirty times, I would be there... it's almost inconceivable to me. It makes the past seem so much less distant to think that I could be only thirty generations removed from Socrates.

Needless to say, time has taken on a whole new scope for me in the past few hours. Let's see where it goes from here.