The poet Elizabeth Bishop, when she was feeling blue (which she often was), used to find comfort in thinking in geological rather than human time. If the vast aeons amid which we wink in and out of existence render our lives insignificant, so too do they render our suffering. As someone else said: nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.
These little worms, I think, can give us a welcome sense of perspective. A worm’s-eye view, if you will
I’m sure these thoughts, or something very like them, will have been the first to have gone through the small brains of the nematode worms which woke up the other day having been asleep for 46,000 years. Along with ‘what now?’ and ‘can you people for Chrissakes keep it down?’ and ‘what about a cup of tea?’ These worms, more even than the question of Nigel Farage’s bank account, were the star of this week’s news cycle: above all, because they really couldn’t give a hoot about the news cycle itself.
Did you miss it? Scientists, basically, discovered a pair of these worms deep-frozen at the bottom of a long-forgotten gopher burrow 130 feet below the Siberian permafrost.
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