That Anything Should Be in Existence at All

Alfred Noyes, The Unknown God

The modern world was not alive to the tremendous Reality that encompassed it. We were surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of darkness and splendor. We built our empires on a pellet of dust revolving around a ball of fire in unfathomable space. Life, that Sphynx, with the human face and the body of a brute, asked us new riddles every hour. Matter itself was dissolving under the scrutiny of Science; and yet, in our daily lives, we were becoming a race of somnambulists, whose very breathing, in train and bus and car, was timed to the movement of the wheels; and the more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all.

- Alfred Noyes, The Unknown God (1934)

A short story:

I’ve had this quote since I was around 19 or so years old—one of the many I’ve saved, and certainly one of my favorites. The imagery it conjures up, the thoughts it provokes, and the reflection it encourages, all in the space of less than 140 words, is really quite remarkable.