Cleaning lady’s response to Werner Herzog

The universe. Profound in its enormity. The detailed atomic structure of a particle in the depths of space, simultaneously illustrating both immeasurable breadth and infinite detail. And likewise we are specks, motes, purposeless fragments floating in our own, great beyond like those very flakes of skin and soil, buffeted by Brownian motion and attracted by still-unexplained laws of gravity and static onto your shelves and the inner surfaces of your electronic devices.

And yet even as we, these miniscule scattered, inconsequential shavings, mere powder filed from that universal grand design, even as we somehow avoid the inevitably grim consequences of our improbable existence, marking each cycle of our tiny planet round the sun as a notch on some celestial stick of achievement, we still strive for explanations, from fulfilled prophecies to punctuated equilibria. We share this common urge for meaning and yet we have different priorities, each of us loosely woven filaments in the threadbare carpet we call civilisation.

Speaking of carpet, you might want to try vacuuming yourself sometime. You might enjoy it.

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Note - this was originally based on the post Werner Herzog's letter to his cleaning lady, still available on Reddit, which itself comes from a book of spoof writings, Letters of Not by Dale Shaw. Herzog later commented on the letter, "There is one letter going around which I supposedly wrote to my cleaning lady, and in which I insult her in the meanest possible way. When you read it, you’ll see that the real author mentions his name right below the heading, but most people completely overlook that because, I suppose, people cannot read." Which, it might be surmised, reinforces the point :)