"Little" things

       After reading “Twenty-Three Snapshots of San Francisco,” I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of a man who chides himself for primarily ruminating on the “trivial” details of his relationship with his (estranged/possibly dead) girlfriend (p. 208) and yet preaches to the reader about the importance of “the dumb stuff” as perhaps the most vital component of one’s memories and life experience. He even questions us, “Is it right to live life knowing every detail will die?”

       Indeed, it may be a greater irony that, just as the culmination of “a lot of little things” led the narrator to choose to remain behind when May leaves on a truck for a refugee camp, and to the gradual deterioration of human civilization described in the story, there are “a lot of little things” our species does mindlessly every day that will ultimately be our undoing.  We generally don’t bat an eyelash at the number of bags of garbage our two to four-person homes crank out in a single week, or the amount of fossil fuels that went into making that factory-fresh pair of sneakers we “just had to have,” let alone consider that all of those “unremarkable” objects and (and the processes involved in their production) are slowly destroying the quality of life on Earth.