The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a few things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses—what the cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Ann coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I’ve any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment.

From “The Mark on the Wall,” by Virginia Woolf

The ignorance of humanity! With a few brilliant sentences, Virginia Woolf sums up the ephemeral nature of our material possessions. Her elegant and florid prose reminds me of the way Spanish classic authors wrote in the Golden Age. We all know about the problem that she addresses in this snippet, don’t we? Nowadays, “what the cat would gnaw’ and “what rat would nibble” are the heavy taxes that weigh on the average citizen everywhere and the excessive burden of big companies and their executives whose limitless earnings are never enough.  Her reflection “the wonder is that I’ve any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment” still applies to us. What we have today, it might be gone tomorrow.