Recently, I saw a vehicle I had not seen in a long time:  a Corvair.  For those of you who remember, it was the Corvair which consumer advocate Ralph Nader made famous (or, better put, infamous) with a book (Unsafe at Any Speed) that described in great detail how dangerous it was to drive.  Although the car's makers protested, Nader's arguments won the day, and the Corvair quickly disappeared, never to be seen again except at automobile shows and the occasional sighting on a city street.
     Why mention the Corvair?  The history of consumer products is lengthy and unending.  Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, literally millions of products have come and gone.  Some are still around.  Each was the fruit of human ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and invention, and each was designed to meet a particular human need.  The Corvair is just one more.
     Every invention, successful or not, however, becomes part of who we are, part of our cultural DNA, part of what makes us human beings.  We live in the products and workmanship of those who came before us.  Their innovations have become ours, just as ours will become the fodder for the generations that will follow us.  So we walk humbly or, as the prophet Micah put it, circumspectly, acutely aware of the minute size of our moment in history.  We are not the beginning, nor are we the end.  We ride a wave that has been cresting for millennia, and one that will crest long after we are gone.
     But the adventure continues, implicit, inexhaustible, real, a real adventure in a real world.  The Corvair and its many counterparts were of course real, but only because life itself is so, a life that is not a dream, but rather a life dreamed from above.