The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

Here’s a fact about the universe, maybe the number one fact: it’s impossible to comprehend how much it doesn’t care about us. It’s not just that it doesn’t care about Life. It doesn’t even care about matter. Everything we think of as everything – starlight, marshmallows, frogs, basketball, electricity, every single person who ever lived and died, all the stuff there is and all the energy – that’s only a minuscule fraction of the universe. The rest of it is darkness – dark energy, dark matter, which are just words scientists use for ‘we don’t know what this is’. What we call the universe is basically a microscopic speck on this giant incomprehensible darkness, like a piece of lint on an XXXXXXXXXXL-size sweater, and life is like a nano-sized speck on that speck. So when you think about it who cares about saving it, or anything in it, because basically none of it was ever even supposed to be there.