On some days, days when we are feeling particularly overwhelmed with the difficulties of existence, many of us may feel as if we are people who, like Virginia Woolf observed in her "Lives of the Obscure," are "advancing with lights in the growing gloom," heading toward obscurity, the obscurity of a life lived, a life enjoyed immensely but a life one day to end, never to return.

    Sounds grim, doesn't it?  Yet consider Emily Dickinson's observation that, "This world is not conclusion."

    Obscurity no more.