A human life is not equivalent to a letter in a scroll, or a word or even a sentence, but something more like a poem. Which is not to say that a life richer in experiences makes for a longer of better poem, it is not an epitaph, but that however simple it seems it contains checks and contradictions, oblique non sequiturs as well as its own unmistakable music. Every life is special, but only in a special way. It is because an individual life is the only container of contradictions, of impossibilities failed or overcome, that mind can have a vehicle, that its great drama of ideas can be played out.