Rae

“In the closing second of the cosmic year there's indus-trialisation, fascism, the combustion engine, Augusto Pinochet, Nikola Tesla, Frida Kahlo, Malala Yousafzai, Alexander Hamilton, Viv Richards, Lucky Luciano, Ada Lovelace,
crowdfunding, the split atom, Pluto, surrealism, plastic, Einstein,
FloJo, Sitting Bull, Beatrix Potter, Indira Gandhi, Niels Bohr, Calamity Jane, Bob Dylan, Random Access Memory, soccer, pebble-dash, unfriending, the Russo-Japanese War, Coco Chanel,
antibiotics, the Burj Khalifa, Billie Holiday, Golda Meir, Igor Stravinsky, pizza,
Thermos flasks, the Cuban Missile Crisis,
thirty summer Olympics and twenty-four winter,
Katsushika Hokusai, Bashar Assad, Lady Gaga, Erik Satie, Muhammad Ali, the deep state, the world wars,
flying,
cyberspace, steel, transistors,
Kosovo, teabags,
W. B. Yeats,
dark matter, jeans, the stock exchange, the Arab Spring,
Virginia Woolf, Alberto Giacometti,
Usain Bolt, Johnny Cash,
birth control,
frozen food,
the sprung mattress,
the Higgs boson,
the moving image,
chess.
Except of course the universe doesn't end at the stroke of midnight. Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital