Rereading My Favourite Play Arcadia By Tom Stoppard (finally Have A Copy Of It Instead Of A Pdf, Hooray!)

rereading my favourite play arcadia by tom stoppard (finally have a copy of it instead of a pdf, hooray!) and i think this dialogue from septimus in scene three rewired my brain and sense of reality as it does each time

image transcript:

“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”