Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard….

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

In this paragraph, Virginia Woolf illustrates the ephemeral nature of life: “Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked!”  When we talk to our elders, they all make the same remark—how fast life passes by. But then, for Virginia Wolf, life was not short enough. Severely depressed, she filled her coat pockets with stones, waded into the water of the river near her home, and drowned herself.

Here is a poem about the nature of life by Calderon de la Barca, which was published in Spain in 1635:

… Life is so unique,

That living is only a dream;

And experience teaches me,

That man lives to dream

What he is until he awakes.

From “Life is a Dream,” by Calderon de la Barca