"The universe is expanding."

"It first really dawns on us emotionally sometime around puberty. Woody Allen, once our untarnished high priest of death and love, captures its roundabout assault perfectly in Annie Hall. The protagonist is shown, in flashback, as a young adolescent. He is sufficiently depressed for the worried mother to drag him to the family doctor—"Listen to what he keeps saying, what's wrong with him, does he have the flu?" The Allenesque adolescent, glazed with despair and panic, announces in a monotone: "The universe is expanding." It's all there—the universe is expanding; look how big infinity is and how finite we are—and he has been initiated into the great secret of our species: we will die and we know it. With that rite of passage, he has found the mother lode of psychic energy that fuels our most irrational and violent moments, our most selfish and our most altruistic ones, our neurotic dialectic of simultaneously mourning and denying, our diets and exercising, our myths of paradise and resurrection. It's as if we were trapped in a mine, shouting out for rescuers, Save us, we're alive but we're getting old and we're going to die."