"I look at all the lonely people," the Beatles once sang in their Eleanor Rigby, "where do they all come from?"  I thought about these lyrics as I was moving through the security lines at the Denver Airport a couple of weeks ago.  Because TSA personnel had us lined up in aisles formed in the shape of a snake, I had ample opportunity to observe my fellow passengers who were, as was I, slowly parading around and around as we moved toward the check-in people who sat in front of the scanners.  I was struck by the incredible diversity of humanity before me, the different skin colors, heights, weights, facial expressions, hair colors, and more flowing through the terminal.
     All these people, I thought, are going somewhere, be it to a place where they are loved, a place where they would be challenged, a place in which they struggle, a place out of which they might find something new, and more.  But they're all going somewhere. Every one of them is living a little life, a little bundle of hopes, joys, pains, and dreams, a sliver of existence in a world that seems at once big and small, a trek of days and weeks of concomitant drivenness and surcease.  It seemed simultaneously totally and absolutely true as well as entirely depressing and opaque.  Where would we all end up? Where would it all end?  Whereof the human race?
     Without any larger point, and without any larger plan, humanity is of course destined to live out its time and subsequently vanish, forever gone and absent from the cosmos. While each of its lives were vastly important in their time, when the last human takes her dying breath, none will really matter.  It will be as though nothing had ever been there, nothing at all.
     In the final scenes of the original Planet of the Apes, as the human and his "wife" leave the apes to start a new life, they come upon a most discouraging sight.  Rising out of an immense pile of sand, a battered Statue of Liberty stands before them.  The once mighty human civilization from which this monument came is now gone, buried in its own waste and debris.  Did it matter for anything?
     It does, yet it doesn't:  absent a creator, there is no absolutely no reason why it should have happened.  Though it indeed happened, we have no way to prove its worth, for all we have to do so is our accidental selves.
     Ah, look at all the lonely people.