As July draws to a close, I think about the span of time, the thirty one days that filled it.  As we all know, not every month has thirty one days; one, as we all know, has, in most years, only twenty-eight.  The other day I was remembering parts of Jean Paul Sartre's play "No Exit."  It's a dark play.  It's not dark because it's full of physical horror but because it is full of a far deeper horror:  the logic of a humanity absent of transcendence.

     Whether a month has thirty-one days or twenty-eight, its days, once they happen, will never return.  They're gone forever.  If, as Sartre writes in this play, hell really is other people, then vanishing days don't really matter:  it's just one less moment of hell on earth.

     If on the other hand transcendence suffuses reality, our days have a different sort of logic.  They're not hell, nor are they the expression of the horror of a life undone.  They are meaningful.  And they are meaningful whether we make them so or not.

     Why else would we bother?