"With how quick a succession, do days, months and years pass over our heads? -- how truly like a shadow that departeth do they flee away insensibly, and scarce leave an impression with us?"
— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Author
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Printed for R. and J. Dodsley
Date
1760
Metaphor
"With how quick a succession, do days, months and years pass over our heads? -- how truly like a shadow that departeth do they flee away insensibly, and scarce leave an impression with us?"
Metaphor in Context
Thus much for this comparison of Job's, which though it is very poetical, yet conveys a just idea of the thing referred to. --"That he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not"--is no less a faithful and fine representation of the shortness and vanity of human life, of which one cannot give a better explanation, than by referring to the original, from whence the picture was taken.-- With how quick a succession, do days, months and years pass over our heads? -- how truly like a shadow that departeth do they flee away insensibly, and scarce leave an impression with us? -- when we endeavour to call them back by reflection, and consider in what manner they have gone, how unable are the best of us to give a tolerable account? -- and were it not for some of the more remarkable stages which have distinguished a few periods of this rapid progress we should look back upon it all as Nebuchadnezzar did upon his dream when he awoke in the morning; he was sensible many things had passed, and troubled Job's comparison, like a blooming flower smit and shrivelled up with a malignant blast. In this stage of life chances multiply upon us, -- the seeds of disorders are sown by intemperance or neglect, -- infectious distempers are more easily contracted, when contracted they rage with greater violence, and the success in many cases is more doubtful, insomuch that they who have exercised themselves in computations of this kind tell us, "That one half of the whole species which are born into the world, go out of it again, and are all dead in so short a space as the first seventeen years."
(II, 73-5)
(II, 73-5)
Categories
Provenance
Reading Jonathan Lamb, Sterne's Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 21.
Citation
Text from The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 2 vols., 6th ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1764). <Link to Vol. 2 in Google Books>
See also The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 2 vols. (London: Printed for R. and J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall, 1760). <Link to ECCO>
See also The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 2 vols. (London: Printed for R. and J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall, 1760). <Link to ECCO>
Date of Entry
01/30/2012
